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Other Books of Essays by the Same Author: 

"Journeys to Bagdad" 
Fifth 'printing, 

"There's Pippins and Cheese to Come" 
Third printing, 

"Chimney-Pot Papers" 
Second printing. 

Also a novel, published by The Century Co., 
New York City, 

"Luca Sarto" 
Second printing. 



Hints to Pilgrims 



fflNTS 

TO 

PIKJRJMS 

BY 
CHARLES S.BRGOKS 
WithPictwres hy 
FlorenceMinard 




newhaven: 

HAU, UNIVErlVSITYPl^BSS 

LONDON.HUMPHH^YMILFOIQ) 

C»CFOKp UNIVEIVSITYPI\PSS 

MDcccc:xxi 






Copyright, 1921, by 
Yale University Press. 



Publisher's Note: 

The Yale University Press makes grateful 
acknowledgment to the Editors of The 
Century Magazine, The Yale Review, The 
Atlantic Monthly and The Literary Review 
for permission to include in the present 
volume essays of which they were the 
original publishers. 



MAy 16 1921 
g)CU614493 



To Edward B. Greene, 
as witness of our long friendship and my high regard. 



I. 


Hints to Pilgrims . 






11 


II. 


I Plan a Vacation . . . ' 






27 


III. 


At a Toy-Shop Window . 






42 


IV. 


Sic Transit — .... 






55 


V. 


The Posture of Authors . 






59 


VI. 


After-Dinner Pleasantries 






77 


VII. 


Little Candles .... 






86 


VIII. 


A Visit to a Poet . . . 






92 


IX. 


Autumn Days 






103 


X. 


On Finding a Plot . 






107 


XI. 


Circus Days 






122 


XII. 


In Praise of a Lawn-Mower 






133 


XIII. 


On Dropping Off to Sleep 






138 


XIV. 


Who Was Jeremy? 






147 


XV. 


A Chapter for Children . . 






153 


XVI. 


The Crowded Curb . . . 






171 


XVII. 


A Corner for Echoes . 






178 



Hints to Pilgrims. 



WHEN a man's thoughts in older time were 
set on pilgrimage, his neighbors came for- 
ward with suggestions. One of them saw 
that his boots were freshly tapped. Another was care- 
ful that his hose were darned with honest wool — an 
oldish aunt, no doubt, with beeswax and thimble and 
glasses forward on her nose. A third sly creature 
fetched in an embroidered wallet to hold an extra shift, 
and hinted in return for a true nail from the holy 
cross. If he were a bachelor, a tender garter was 
offered him by a lonely maiden of the village, and was 
acknowledged beneath the moon. But the older folk 
who had made the pilgrimage took the settle and fell 
to argument on the merit of the inns. They scrawled 
maps for his guidance on the hearth, and told him the 
sights that must not be missed. Here he must veer 
off for a holy well. Here he must beware a treacher- 
ous bog. Here he must ascend a steeple for the view. 
They cautioned him to keep upon the highway. Was 
it not Christian, they urged, who was lost in By-path 
Meadow? Again they talked of thieves and warned 
him to lay a chair against the door. Then a honey 
syllabub was drunk in clinking cups, and they made a 
night of it. 

Or perhaps our pilgrim belonged to a guild which — 
by an agreeable precedent — voted that its members 



IS HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

walk with him to the city's gate and present from each 
a half -penny to support him on the journey. The 
greasy pockets yield their treasure. He rattles on 
both sides with generous copper. Here, also, is a salve 
for man and beast — a receipt for a fever-draught. 
We may fancy now the pilgrim's mule plowing up the 
lazy dust at the turn of the road as he waves his last 
farewell. His thoughts already have leaped the valley 
to the misty country beyond the hills. 

And now above his dusty road the sun climbs the 
exultant noon. It whips its flaming chariot to the 
west. On the rim of twilight, like a traveler who de- 
parts, it throws a golden offering to the world. 

But there are pilgrims in these later days, also, — 
strangers to our own fair city, script in wallet and 
staff in hand, — ^who come to place their heavy tribute 
on our shrine. And to them I offer these few sug- 
gestions. 

The double stars of importance — as in Baedeker — 
mark our restaurants and theatres. Dear pilgrim, 
put money in thy purse! Persuade your guild to ad- 
vance you to a penny! They mark the bridges, the 
shipping, the sharp canyons of the lower city, the 
parks — limousines where silk and lace play nurse to 
lap dogs — Bufo on an airing, the precious spitz upon 
a scarlet cushion. They mark the parade of wealth, 
the shops and glitter of Fifth Avenue on a winter 
afternoon. "If this is Fifth Avenue," — as I heard a 
dazzled stranger comment lately on a bus-top, — "my 
God ! what must First Avenue be like !" 



HINTS TO PILGRIMS 13 

And then there are the electric signs — the mammoth 
kitten rolling its ball of silk, ginger-ale that forever 
issues from a bottle, a fiery motor with a flame of dust, 
the Wrigley triplets correcting their sluggish livers 
by exercise alongside the Astor roof. Surely letters 
despatched home to Kalamazoo deal excitedly with 
these flashing portents. And of the railroad stations 
and the Woolworth Tower with its gothic pinnacles 
questing into heaven, what pilgrim words are ade- 
quate! Here, certainly, Kalamazoo is baffled and 
must halt and bite its pen. 

Nor can the hotels be described — toppling struc- 
tures that run up to thirty stories — at night a clatter 
in the basement and a clatter on the roof — sons of 
Belial and rich folk from Akron who are spending the 
profit on a few thousand hot-water bottles and inner 
tubes — ^what mad pursuit! what pipes and timbrels! 
what wild ecstasy ! Do we set a noisy band upon our 
towers in the hope that our merriment will sound to 
Mars? Do we persuade them that jazz is the music 
of the spheres? But at morning in these hotels are 
thirty stories of snoring bipeds — exhausted trousers 
across the bed-post, frocks that have been rumpled in 
the hubbub — tier on tier of bipeds, with sleepy cur- 
tains drawn against the light. Boniface, in the olden 
time, sunning himself beneath his bush and swinging 
dragon, watching the dust for travelers, how would he 
be amazed at the advancement of the inn! Dear pil- 
grim, you must sag and clink for entrance to the 



H, HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

temples of our joyous gods. Put money in thy purse 
and wire ahead! 

On these streets there is a roar of traffic that Baby- 
lon never heard. Nineveh in its golden age could have 
packed itself with all its splendid luggage in a single 
building. Athens could have mustered in a street. 
Our block-parties that are now the fashion — neighbor- 
hood affairs in fancy costumes, with a hot trombone, 
and banners stretched from house to house — produce 
as great an uproar as ever arose upon the Acropolis. 
And lately, when our troops returned from overseas 
and marched beneath our plaster arches, Rome itself 
could not have matched the largeness of our triumph. 
Here, also, men have climbed up to walls and battle- 
ments — but to what far dizzier heights! — ^to towers 
and windows, and to chimney-tops, to see great 
Pompey pass the streets. 

And by what contrast shall we measure our tall 
buildings? Otus and Ephialtes, who contracted once 
to pile Pehon on top of Ossa, were evidently builders 
who touched only the larger jobs. They did not stoop 
to a cottage or a bungalow, but figured entirely on 
such things as arks and the towers of Jericho. When 
old Cheops sickened, it is said, and thought of death, 
they offered a bid upon his pyramid. Noah, if he was 
indeed their customer, as seems likely, must have 
fretted them as their work went forward. Whenever 
a cloud appeared in the rainy east he nagged them for 
better speed. He prowled around on Sunday morn- 
ings with his cubit measure to detect any shortness in 



HINTS TO PILGRIMS 15 

the beam. Or he looked for knot-holes in the gopher 
wood. But Otus and Ephialtes could not, with all 
their sweating workmen, have fetched enough stones 
for even the foundations of one of our loftier 
structures. 

The Tower of Babel, if set opposite Wall Street, 
would squat as low as Trinity: for its top, when con- 
fusion broke off the work, had advanced scarcely more 
than seven stories from the pavement. My own win- 
dows, dwarfed by my surroundings, look down from 
as great a height. Indeed, I fancy that if the famous 
tower were my neighbor to the rear — on Ninth Street, 
just off the L — ^its whiskered masons on the upmost 
platform could have scraped acquaintance with our 
cook. They could have gossiped at the noon hour 
from gutter to sink, and eaten the crullers that the 
kind creature tossed across. Our whistling grocery- 
man woidd have found a rival. And yet the good folk 
of the older Testament, ignorant of our accomplish- 
ment to come, were in amazement at the tower, and 
strangers came in from Gilead and Beersheba. Trip- 
pers, as it were, upon a holiday — staff in hand and 
pomegranates in a papyrus bag — ^locusts and wild 
honey, or manna to sustain them in the wilderness on 
their return — trippers, I repeat, cocked back their 
heads, and they counted the rows of windows to the 
top and went off to their far land marveling. 

The Bankers Trust Building culminates in a pyra- 
mid. Where this narrows to a point there issues a 
streamer of smoke. I am told that inside this pyra- 



16 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

mid, at a dizzy height above the street, there is a 
storage room for gold. Is it too fanciful to think that 
inside, upon this unsunned heap of metal, there is con- 
cealed an altar of Manmaon with priests to feed the 
fire, and that this smoke, rising in the lazy air, is sweet 
in the nostrils of the greedy god? 

There is what seems to be a chapel on the roof of 
the Bush Terminal. Gothic decoration marks our 
buildings — the pointed arch, mullions and gargoyles. 
There are few nowadays to listen to the preaching of 
the church, but its symbol is at least a pretty ornament 
on our conmiercial towers. 

Nor in the general muster of our sights must I 
forget the magic view from across the river, in the end 
of a winter afternoon, when the lower city is still 
lighted. The clustered windows shine as if a larger 
constellation of stars had met in thick convention. 
But it is to the eye of one who travels in the evening 
mist from Staten Island that towers of finest gossamer 
arise. They are built to furnish a fantastic dream. 
The architect of the summer clouds has tried here his 
finer hand. 

It was only lately when our ferry-boat came around 
the point of Governor's Island, that I noticed how 
sharply the chasm of Broadway cuts the city. It was 
the twilight of a winter's day. A rack of sullen clouds 
lay across the sky as if they met for mischief, and the 
water was black with wind. In the threatening ob- 
scurity the whole island seemed a mightier House of 
Usher, intricate of many buildings, cleft by Broadway 



HINTS TO PILGRIMS 17 

in its middle, and ready to fall prostrate into the dark 
waters of the tarn. But until the gathering tempest 
rises and an evil moon peers through the crevice, as in 
the story, we must judge the city to be safe. 

Northward are nests of streets, thick with children. 
One might think that the old woman who lived in a 
shoe dwelt hard by, with all of her married sisters 
roundabout. Children scurry under foot, oblivious of 
contact. They shoot their marbles between our feet, 
and we are the moving hazard of their score. They 
chalk their games upon the pavement. Baseball is 
played, long and thin, between the gutters. Peddlers' 
carts line the curb — carrots, shoes and small hardware 
— and there is shrill chaffering all the day. Here are 
dim restaurants, with truant smells for their adver- 
tisement. In one of these I was served unleavened 
bread. Folk from Damascus would have felt at home, 
and yet the shadow of the Woolworth Tower was 
across the roof. The loaf was rolled thin, like a chair- 
pad that a monstrous fat man habitually sits upon. 
Indeed, I looked sharply at my ample waiter on the 
chance that it was he who had taken his ease upon my 
bread. If Kalamazoo would tire for a night of the 
Beauty Chorus and the Wrigley triplets, and would 
walk these streets of foreign population, how amazing 
would be its letters home ! 

Our Greenwich Village, also, has its sights. Time 
was when we were really a village beyond the city. 
Even more remotely there were farms upon us and 
comfortable burghers jogged up from town to find 



18 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

the peace of country. There was once a swamp where 
Washington Square now is, and, quite lately, masons 
in demolishing a foundation struck into a conduit of 
running water that still drains our pleasant park. 
When Broadway was a muddy post-road, stretching 
for a weary week to Albany, ducks quacked about us 
and were shot with blunderbuss. Yes, and they were 
doubtless roasted, with apple-sauce upon the side. 
And then a hundred years went by, and the breathless 
city jumped to the north and left us a village in its 
midst. 

It really is a village. The grocer gives you credit 
without question. Further north, where fashion 
shops, he would inspect you up and down with a cruel 
eye and ask a reference. He would linger on any 
patch or shiny spot to trip your credit. But here he 
wets his pencil and writes down the order without 
question. His friendly cat rubs against your bundles 
on the counter. The shoemaker inquires how your 
tapped soles are wearing. The bootblack, without 
lifting his eyes, knows you by the knots in your shoe- 
strings. I fear he beats his wife, for he has a great 
red nose which even prohibition has failed to cool. 
The little woman at the corner offers you the Times 
before you speak. The cigar man tosses you a pack- 
age of Camels as you enter. Even the four-corners 
beyond Berea — unknown, remote, quite off the gen- 
eral travel — could hardly be more familiar with the 
preference of its oldest citizen. We need only a 
pump, and a pig and chickens in the street. 



HINTS TO PILGRIMS 19 

Our gossip is smaller than is found in cities. If we 
had yards and gardens we would talk across the fence 
on Monday like any village, with clothes-pins in our 
mouths, and pass our ailments down the street. 

But we are crowded close, wall to wall. I see my 
neighbor cooking across the street. Each morning 
she jolts her dust-mop out of the window. I see 
shadows on a curtain as a family sits before the fire. 
A novelist is down below. By the frenzy of his 
fingers on the typewriter it must be a tale of great 
excitement. He never pauses or looks at the ceiling 
for a plot. At night he reads his pages to his patient 
wife, when they together have cleared away the dishes. 
In another window a girl lies abed each morning. 
Exactly at 7.45, after a few minutes of sleepy stretch- 
ing, I see her slim legs come from the coverlet. Once 
she caught my eye. She stuck out her tongue. Your 
stockings, my dear, hang across the radiator. 

We have odd characters, too, known to everybody, 
just as small towns have, who, in country circum- 
stance, would whittle on the bench outside the village 
store. The father of a famous poet, but himself un- 
known except hereabouts, has his chair in the corner 
of a certain restaurant, and he offers wisdom and 
reminiscence to a coterie. He is our Johnson at the 

Mitre. Old M , who lives in the Alley in what was 

once a hayloft — now a studio, — is known from Fourth 
to Twelfth Street for his Indian curry and his knowl- 
edge of the older poets. It is his pleasant custom to 
drop in on his friends from time to time and cook their 



HINTS TO PILGRIMS 



dinner. He tosses you an ancient sonnet as he stirs 
the pot, or he beats time with his iron spoon to a 
melody of the Pathetique. He knows Shakespeare to 
a comma, and discourses so agreeably that the Madi- 
son Square clock fairly races up to midnight. Every 
morning, it is said — but I doubt the truth of this, for 
a gossiping lady told me — every morning until the 
general drouth set in, he issued from the Alley for 
a toddy to sustain his seventy years. Sometimes, she 

says, old M went without tie or collar on these 

quick excursions, yet with the manners of the Empire 
and a sweeping bow, if he met any lady of his 
acquaintance. 

A famous lecturer in a fur collar sweeps by me 
often, with his eyes on the poetic stars. As he takes 
the air this sunny morning he thinks of new paradoxes 
to startle the ladies at his matinee. How they love to 
be shocked by his wicked speech ! He is such a daring, 
handsome fellow — so like a god of ancient Greece! 

And of course most of us know T , who gives a 

yearly dinner at an Assyrian restaurant — sixty cents 
a plate, with a near-beer extra from a saloon across 
the way. Any guest may bring a friend, but he must 
give ample warning in order that the table may be 
stretched. 

The chief poet of our village wears a corduroy suit 
and goes without his hat, even in winter. If a comedy 
of his happens to be playing at a little theatre, he him- 
self rings a bell in his favorite restaurant and makes 
the announcement in true Elizabethan fashion. 



HINTS TO PILGRIMS 21 

"Know ye, one and all, there is a conceited comedy 
this night — " His hair is always tousled. But, as its 
confusion continues from March into the quieter 
months, the disarrangement springs not so much from 
the outer tempest as from the poetic storms inside. 

Then we have a kind of Peter Pan grown to shiny 
middle life, who makes ukuleles for a living. On any 
night of special celebration he is prevailed upon to 
mount a table and sing one of his own songs to this 
accompaniment. These songs tell what a merry, 
wicked crew we are. He sings of the artists' balls that 
ape the Bohemia of Paris, of our genius, our unre- 
straint, our scorn of all convention. What is morality 
but a suit to be discarded when it is old? What is life, 
he sings, but a mad jester with tinkling bells? Youth 
is brief, and when dead we're buried deep. So let's 
romp and drink and kiss. It is a pagan song that has 
lasted through the centuries. If it happens that any 
folk are down from the uptown hotels, Peter Pan 
consents to sell a ukulele between his encores. Here, 
my dear pilgrims, is an entertainment to be squeezed 
between Ziegf eld's and the Winter Garden. 

You are welcome at all of our restaurants — our 
Samovars, the Pig and Whistle, the Three Steps 
Down (a crowded room, where you spill your soup as 
you carry it to a table, but a cheap, honest place in 
which to eat), the Green Witch, the Simple Simon. 
The food is good at all of these places. Grope your 
way into a basement — ^wherever one of our fantastic 
signs hangs out — or climb broken stairs into a dusty 



HINTS TO PILGRIMS 



garret — over a contractor's storage of old lumber and 
bath-tubs — over the litter of the roofs — and you will 
find artistic folk with flowing ties, spreading their 
elbows at bare tables with unkept, dripping candles. 

Here is youth that is blown hither from distant 
villages — ^j^outh that was misunderstood at home — 
youth that looks from its poor valley to the heights 
and follows a flame across the darkness — ^youth whose 
eyes are a window on the stars. Here also, alas, are 
slim white moths about a candle. And here wrinkled 
children play at life and art. 

Here are radicals who plot the reformation of the 
world. They hope it may come by peaceful means, 
but if necessary will welcome revolution and machine- 
guns. They demand free speech, but put to silence 
any utterance less red than their own. 

Here are seething sonneteers, playwrights bulging 
with rejected manuscript, young women with bobbed 
hair and with cigarettes lolling limply at their mouths. 
For a cigarette, I have observed, that hangs loosely 
from the teeth shows an artistic temperament, just as 
in business circles a cigar that is tilted up until it 
warms the nose marks a sharp commercial nature. 

But business counts for little with us. Recently, to 
make a purchase, I ventured of an evening into one of 
our many small shops of fancy wares. Judge my em- 
barrassment to see that the salesman was entertain- 
ing a young lady on his knee. I was too far inside to 
retreat. Presently the salesman shifted the lady to 
his other knee and, brushing a lock of her hair off his 



HINTS TO PILGRIMS 



nose, asked me what I wanted. But I was unwilling 
to disturb his hospitality. I begged him not to lay 
down his pleasant burden, but rather to neglect my 
presence. He thanked me for my courtesy, and made 
his guest comfortable once more while I fumbled 
along the shelves. By good luck the price was marked 
upon my purchase. I laid down the exact change and 
tip-toed out. 

The peddlers of our village, our street musicians, 
our apple men, belong to us. They may wander now 
and then to the outside world for a silver tribute, yet 
they smile at us on their return as at their truest 
friends. Ice creaks up the street in a little cart and 
trickles at the cracks. Rags and bottles go by with a 
familiar, jangling bell. Scissors grinders have a bell, 
also, with a flat, tinny sound, like a cow that forever 
jerks its head with flies. But it was only the other day 
that two fellows went by selHng brooms. These were 
interlopers from a noisier district, and they raised up 
such a clamor that one would have thought that the 
Armistice had been signed again. The clatter was so 
unusual — our own merchants are of quieter voice — 
that a dozen of us thrust our heads from our windows. 
Perhaps another German government had fallen. 
The novelist below me put out his shaggy beard. The 
girl with the slim legs was craned out of the sill with 
excitement. My pretty neighbor below, who is im- 
maculate when I meet her on the stairs, was in her 
mob-cap. 

My dear pilgrim from the West, with your ample 



U HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

house and woodshed, your yard with its croquet set 
and hammock between the wash-poles, you have no 
notion how we are crowded on the island. Laundry 
tubs are concealed beneath kitchen tables. Boxes for 
clothes and linen are ambushed under our beds. Any 
burglar hiding there would have to snuggle among the 
moth balls. Sitting-room tables are swept of books 
for dinner. Bookcases are desks. Desks are beds. 
Beds are couches. Couches are — bless you! all the 
furniture is at masquerade. Kitchen chairs turn up- 
side down and become step-ladders. If anything does 
not serve at least two uses it is a slacker. Beds tumble 
out of closets. Fire escapes are nurseries. A patch 
of roof is a pleasant garden. A bathroom becomes a 
kitchen, with a lid upon the tub for groceries, and the 
milk cooling below with the cold faucet drawn. 

A room's use changes with the clock. That girl 
who lives opposite, when she is dressed in the morn- 
ing, puts a Bagdad stripe across her couch. She 
punches a. row of colored pillows against the wall. 
Her bedroom is now ready for callers. It was only 
the other day that I read of a new invention by which 
a single room becomes four rooms simply by pressing 
a button. This is the manner of the magic. In a 
corner, let us say, of a rectangular room there is set 
into the floor a turntable ten feet across. On this are 
built four compartments, shaped like pieces of pie. In 
one of these is placed a bath-tub and stand, in another 
a folding-bed and wardrobe, in a third is a kitchen 
range and cupboard, and in the fourth a bookcase and 



HINTS TO PILGRIMS ^5 

piano. Must I explain the mystery? On rising you 
fold away your bed and spin the circle for your tub. 
And then in turn your stove appears. At last, when 
you have whirled your dishes to retirement, the piano 
comes in sight. It is as easy as spinning the caster 
for the oil and vinegar. A whirling Susan on the 
supper table is not more nimble. With this device it 
is estimated that the population of our snug island 
can be quadruplicated, and that landlords can double 
their rents with untroubled conscience. Or, by swing- 
ing a fifth piece of pie out of the window, a sleeping- 
porch could be added. When the morning alarm goes 
off you have only to spin the disk and dress in com- 
fort beside the radiator. Or you could — but possi- 
bilities are countless. 

Tom Paine died on Grove Street. O. Henry lived 
on Irving Place and ate at Allaire's on Third Avenue. 
The Aquarium was once a fort on an island in the 
river. Later Lafayette was welcomed there. And 
Jenny Lind sang there. John Masefield swept out 
a saloon, it's said, on Sixth Avenue near the Jefferson 
Market, and, for all I know, his very broom may be 
still standing behind the door. The Bowery was once 
a post-road up toward Boston. In the stream that 
flowed down Maiden Lane, Dutch girls did the family 
washing. In William Street, not long ago, they were 
tearing down the house in which Alexander Hamilton 
lived. These are facts at random. 

But Captain Kidd lived at 119 Pearl Street. Dear 
me, I had thought that he was a creature of a nursery 



HINTS TO PILGRIMS 



book — one of the pirates whom Sinbad fought. And 
here on Pearl Street, in our own city, he was arrested 
and taken to hang in chains in London. A restaurant 
now stands at 119. A bucket of oyster shells is at 
the door, and, inside, a clatter of hungry spoons. 

But the crowd thickens on these narrow streets. 
Work is done for the day and tired folk hurry home. 
Crowds flow into the subway entrances. The streets 
are flushed, as it were, with people, and the flood 
drains to the rushing sewers. Now the lights go out 
one by one. The great buildings, that glistened but 
a moment since at every window, are now dark cliffs 
above us in the wintry mist. 

It is time, dear pilgrim, to seek your hotel or 
favorite cabaret. 

The Wrigley triplets once more correct by exercise 
their sluggish livers. The kitten rolls its ball of fiery 
silk. Times Square flashes with entertainment. It 
stretches its ghttering web across the night. 

Dear pilgrim, a last important word! Put money 
in thy purse ! 



I Plan a Vacation. 

IT is my hope, when the snow is off the ground 
and the ocean has been tamed by breezes from 
the south, to cross to England. Already I fancy 
myself seated in the pleasant office of the steamship 
agent, listening to his gossip of rates and sailings, 
bending over his colored charts, weighing the merit 
of cabins. Here is one amidships in a location of 
greatest ease upon the stomach. Here is one with a 
forward port that will catch the sharp and wholesome 
wind from the Atlantic. I trace the giant funnels 
from deck to deck. My finger follows delightedly 
the confusing passages. I smell the rubber on the 
landings and the salty rugs. From on top I hear the 
wind in the cordage. I view the moon, and I see the 
mast swinging among the stars. 

Then, also, at the agent's, for my pleasure, there is 
a picture of a ship cut down the middle, showing its 
inner furnishing and the hum of life on its many 
decks. I study its flights of steps, its strange tubes 
and vents and boilers. Munchausen's horse, when its 
rearward end was snapped off by the falling gate (the 
faithful animal, you may recall, galloped for a mile 
upon its forward legs alone before the misadventure 
was discovered) — Munchausen's horse, I insist, — the 
unbroken, forward half, — did not display so frankly 
its confusing pipes and coils. Then there is another 



HINTS TO PILGRIMS 



ship which, by a monstrous effort of the printer, is laid 
in Broadway, where its stacks out-top Trinity. I pace 
its mighty length on the street before my house, and 
my eye climbs our tallest tree for a just comparison. 

It is my hope to find a man of like ambition and 
endurance as myself and to walk through England. 
He must be able, if necessary, to keep to the road for 
twenty-five miles a day, or, if the inn runs before us 
in the dark, to stretch to thirty. But he should be a 
creature, also, who is content to doze in meditation 
beneath a hedge, heedless whether the sun, in faster 
boots, puts into lodging first. Careless of the hour, 
he may remark in my sleepy ear "how the shadows 
lengthen as the sun declines." 

He must be able to jest when his feet are tired. His 
drooping grunt must be spiced with humor. When 
stiffness cracks him in the morning, he can the better 
play the clown. He will not grumble at his bed or 
poke too shrewdly at his food. Neither will he talk 
of graves and rheumatism when a rainstorm finds us 
unprepared. If he snuffle at the nose, he must snuffle 
cheerfully and with hope. Wit, with its unexpected 
turns, is to be desired ; but a pleasant and even humor 
is a better comrade on a dusty road. It endures 
blisters and an empty stomach. A pack rests more 
lightly on its weary shoulders. If he sing, he should 
know a round of tunes and not wear a single melody 
to tatters. The merriest lilt grows dull and lame when 
it travels all the day. But although I wish my com- 
panion to be of a cheerful temper, he need not pipe or 



I PLAN A VACATION 



dance until the mists have left the hills. Does not the 
shining sun itself rise slowly to its noonday glory? A 
companion must give me leave to enjoy in silence my 
sullen breakfast. 

A talent for sketching shall be welcome. Let him 
produce his pencils and his tablet at a pointed arch or 
mullioned window, or catch us in absurd posture as 
we travel. If one tumbles in a ditch, it is but decency 
to hold the pose until the picture's made. 

But, chiefly, a companion should be quick with a 
smile and nod, apt for conversation along the road. 
Neither beard nor ringlet must snub his agreeable 
advance. Such a fellow stirs up a mixed acquaintance 
between town and town, to point the shortest way — a 
bit of modest gingham mixing a pudding at a pantry 
window, age hobbling to the gate on its friendly 
crutch, to show how a better path climbs across the 
hills. Or in a taproom he buys a round of ale and 
becomes a crony of the place. He enlists a dozen 
friends to sniff outdoors at bedtime, with conflicting 
prophecy of a shifting wind and the chance of rain. 

A companion should be alert for small adventure. 
He need not, therefore, to prove himself, run to 
grapple with an angry dog. Rather, let him soothe 
the snarhng creature! Let him hold the beast in 
parley while I go on to safety with unsoiled dignity! 
Onlv when arbitration and soft terms fail shall he 
offer a haunch of his own fair flesh. Generously he 
must boost me up a tree, before he seeks safety for 
himself. 



so HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

But many a trivial mishap, if followed with a 
willing heart, leads to comedy and is a jest thereafter. 
I know a man who, merely by following an inquisitive 
nose through a doorway marked "No Admittance," 
became comrade to a company of traveling actors. 
The play was Uncle Tom's Cabins and they were at 
rehearsal. Presently, at a changing of the scene, my 
friend boasted to Little Eva, as they sat together on 
a pile of waves, that he performed upon the tuba. It 
seems that she had previously mounted into heaven in 
the final picture without any welcoming trumpet of 
the angels. That night, by her persuasion, my friend 
sat in the upper wings and dispensed flutings of great 
joy as she ascended to her rest. 

Three other men of my acquaintance were caught 
once, between towns, on a walking trip in the Adiron- 
dacks, and fell by chance into a kind of sanitarium for 
convalescent consumptives. At first it seemed a 
gloomy prospect. But, learning that there was a 
movie in a near-by village, they secured two jitneys 
and gave a party for the inmates. In the church 
parlor, when the show was done, they ate ice-cream 
and layer-cake. Two of the men were fat, but the 
third, a slight and handsome fellow — I write on sus- 
picion only — so won a pretty patient at the feast, that, 
on the homeward ride — ^they vrere rattling in the 
tonneau — she graciously permitted him to steady her 
at the bumps and sudden turns. 

Nor was this the end. As it still lacked an hour of 
midnight the general sanitarium declared a Roman 



/ PLAN A VACATION SI 

holiday. The slight fellow, on a challenge, did a 
hand-stand, with his feet waving against the wall, 
while his knife and keys and money dropped from 
his pockets. The pretty patient read aloud some 
verses of her own upon the spring. She brought 
down her water-colors, and laying a charcoal portrait 
off the piano, she ranged her lovely wares upon the 
top. The fattest of my friends, also, eager to do his 
part, stretched himself, heels and head, between two 
chairs. But, when another chair was tossed on his 
unsupported middle, he fell with a boom upon the 
carpet. Then the old doctor brought out wine and 
Bohemian glasses with long stems and, as the clock 
struck twelve, the company pledged one another's 
health, with hopes for a reunion. They lighted their 
candles on the landing, and so to bed. 

I know a man, also, who once met a sword- 
swallower at a county fair. A volunteer was needed 
for his trick — someone to hold the scarlet cushion with 
its dangerous knives — and zealous friends pushed him 
from his seat and toward the stage. Afterwards he 
met the Caucasian Beauties and, despite his timidity, 
they dined together with great merriment. 

Then there is a kind of humorous philosophy to be 
desired on an excursion. It smokes a contented pipe 
to the time of every rivulet. It rests a peaceful 
stomach on the rail of every bridge, and it observes 
the floating leaves, like golden caravels upon the 
stream. It interprets a trivial event. It is both 
serious and absurd. It sits on a fence to moralize on 



HINTS TO PILGRIMS 



the life of cows and flings in Plato on the soul. It 
plays catch and toss with life and death and the world 
beyond. And it sees significance in common things. 
A farmer's cart is a tumbril of the Revolution. A 
crowing rooster is Chanticleer. It is the very cock 
that proclaimed to Hamlet that the dawn was nigh. 
When a cloud rises up, such a philosopher discourses 
of the flood. He counts up the forty rainy days and 
names the present rascals to be drowned — profiteers 
in food, plumbers and all laundrymen. 

A stable lantern, swinging in the dark, rouses up a 
race of giants — 

I think it was some such fantastic quality of thought 
that Horace Walpole had in mind when he com- 
mended the Three Princes of Serendip. Their High- 
nesses, it seems, "were always making discoveries, by 
accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in 
quest of: for instance," he writes, "one of them dis- 
covered that a mule blind of the right eye had 
traveled the same road lately, because the grass was 
eaten on the left side." At first, I confess, this em- 
ployment seems a waste of time. Sherlock Holmes 
did better when he pronounced, on finding a neglected 
whisp of beard, that Doctor Watson's shaving mirror 
had been shifted to an opposite window. But doubt- 
less the Princes put their deduction to higher use, and 
met the countryside and village with shrewd and vivid 
observation. 

Don Quixote had this same quality, but with more 
than a touch of madness. Did he not build up the 



1 PLAN A VACATION 



Lady Tolosa out of a common creature at an inn? 
He sought knighthood at the hands of its stupid 
keeper and watched his armor all night by the foolish 
moon. He tilted against a windmill. I cannot whole- 
heartedly commend the Don, but, for an afternoon, 
certainly, I would prefer his company between town 
and town to that of any man who carries his clanking 
factory on his back. 

But, also, I wish a companion of my travels to be 
for the first time in England, in order that I may have 
a fresh audience for my superior knowledge. In the 
cathedral towns I wish to wave an instructive finger 
in crypt and aisle. Here is a bit of early glass. Here 
is a wall that was plastered against the plague when 
the Black Prince was still alive. I shall gossip of 
scholars in cord and gown, working at their rubric in 
sunny cloisters. Or if I choose to talk of kings and 
forgotten battles, I wish a companion ignorant but 
eager for my boasting. 

It was only last night that several of us discussed 
vacations. Wyoming was the favorite — a ranch, with 
a month on horseback in the mountains, hemlock 
brouse for a bed, morning at five and wood to chop. 
But a horse is to me a troubled creature. He stands 
to too great a height. His eye glows with exultant 
deviltry as he turns and views my imperfection. His 
front teeth seem made for scraping along my arm. 
I dread any fly or bee lest it sting him to emotion. 
I am point to point in agreement with the psalmist: 
"An horse is a vain thing for safety." If I must ride. 



34^ HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

I demand a tired horse, who has cropped his wild oats 
and has come to a slippered state. Are we not told 
that the horse in the crustaceous age — I select a large 
word at random — was built no bigger than a dog? 
Let this snug and peerless ancestor be saddled and I 
shall buy a ticket for the West. 

But I do not at this time desire to beard the wilder- 
ness. There is a camp of Indians near the ranch. I 
can smell them these thousand miles away. Their 
beads and greasy blankets hold no charm. Smoky 
bacon, indeed, I like. I can lie pleasurably at the flap 
of the tent with sleepy eyes upon the stars. I can 
even plunge in a chilly pool at dawn. But the Indians 
and horses that infest Wyoming do not arouse my 
present interest. 

I am for England, therefore — for its winding roads, 
its villages that nest along the streams, its peaked 
bridges with salmon jumping at the weir, its thatched 
cottages and flowering hedges. 

"The chaffinch sings on the orchard bough 
In England — now!" 

I wish to see reapers at work in Surrey fields, to 
stride over the windy top of Devon, to cross Wiltshire 
when wind and rain and mist have brought the Druids 
back to Stonehenge. At a crossroad Stratford is ten 
miles off. Raglan's ancient towers peep from a 
wooded hill. Tintern or Glastonbury can be gained 
by night. Are not these names sweet upon the 
tongue ? And I wish a black- timbered inn in which to 



I PLAN A VACATION 



35 



end the day — ^with polished brasses in the tap and the 
smell of the musty centuries upon the stairs. 

At the window of our room the Cathedral spire 
rises above the roofs. There is no trolley-car or 
creaking of any wheel, and on the pavement we hear 
only the fall of feet in endless pattern. Day weaves 
a hurrying mesh, but this is the quiet fabric of the 
night. 

I wish to walk from London to Inverness, to climb 




36 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

the ghostly ramparts of Macbeth's castle, to hear the 
shrill cry of Duncan's murder in the night, to watch 
for witches on the stormy moor. I shall sit on the 
bench where Johnson sat with Boswell on his journey 
to the Hebrides. I shall see the wizard of the North, 
lame of foot, walking in the shade of ruined Dry- 
burgh. With drunken Tam, I shall behold in AUo- 
way Kirk warlocks in a dance. From the gloomy 
house of Shaws and its broken tower David Balfour 
runs in flight across the heather. CuUoden echoes with 
the defeat of an outlaw prince. The stairs of Holy- 
rood drip with Rizzio's blood. But also, I wish to fol- 
low the Devon lanes, to rest in villages on the coast at 
the fall of day when fishermen wind their nets, to 
dream of Arthur and his court on the rocks beyond 
Tintagel. Merlin lies in Wales with his dusty gar- 
ments pulled about him, and his magic sleeps. But 
there is wind tonight in the noisy caverns of the sea, 
and Spanish pirates dripping with the slime of a 
watery grave, bury their treasure when the fog lies 
thick. 

Thousands of years have peopled these English 
villages. Their pavements echo with the tread of 
kings and poets. Here is a sunny bower for lovers 
when the world was young. Bishops of the Roman 
church — Saint Thomas himself in his robes pontifical 
has walked through these broken cloisters. Here is 
the altar where he knelt at prayer when his assassins 
came. From that tower Mary of Scotland looked 
vainly for assistance to gallop from the north. 



/ FLAN A VACATION 37 

Here stretches the Pilgrims' Way across the downs 
of Surrey — worn and scratched by pious feet. From 
the west they came to Canterbury. The wind stirs 
the far-off traffic, and the mist covers the hills as with 
an ancient memory. 

How many thirsty elbows have rubbed this table in 
the forgotten years! How many feasts have come 
steaming from the kitchen when the London coach 
was in! That pewter cup, maybe, offered its eager 
pledge when the news of Agincourt was blown from 
France. Up that stairway Tom Jones reeled with 
sparkling canary at his belt. These cobbles clacked 
in the Pretender's flight. Here is the chair where 
Falstaff sat when he cried out that the sack was 
spoiled with villainous lime. That signboard creaked 
in the tempest that shattered the Armada. 

My fancy mingles in the past. It hears in the inn- 
yard the chattering pilgrims starting on their journey. 
Here is the Pardoner jesting with the merry Wife of 
Bath, with his finger on his lips to keep their scandal 
private. It sees Dick Turpin at the crossroads with 
loaded pistols in his boots. There is mist tonight on 
Bagshot Heath, and men in Kendal green are out. 
And fancy rebuilds a ruined castle, and lights the hos- 
pitable fires beneath its mighty caldrons. It hangs 
tapestry on its empty walls and, like a sounding 
trumpet, it summons up a gaudy company in ruff and 
velvet to tread the forgotten measures of the past. 

Let Wyoming go and hang itself in its muddy 
riding-boots and khaki shirt! Let its tall horses leap 



S8 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

upward and click their heels upon the moon! I am 
for England. 

It is my preference to land at Plymouth, and our 
anchor — if the captain is compliant — will be dropped 
at night, in order that the Devon hills, as the thrifty 
stars are dimmed, may appear first through the mists 
of dawn. If my memory serves, there is a country 
church with stone-embattled tower on the summit 
above the town, and in the early twilight all the roads 
that climb the hills lead away to promised kingdoms. 
Drake, I assert, still bowls nightly on the quay at 
Plymouth, with pins that rattle in the windy season, 
but the game is done when the light appears. 

We clatter up to London. Paddington station or 
Waterloo, I care not. But for arrival a rainy night is 
best, when the pavements glisten and the mad taxis 
are rushing to the theatres. And then, for a week, by 
way of practice and to test our boots, we shall trudge 
the streets of London — the Strand and the Embank- 
ment. And certainly we shall explore the Temple 
and find the sites of Blackf riars and the Globe. Here, 
beyond this present brewery, was the bear-pit. Tarl- 
ton's jests still sound upon the bank. A wherry, once, 
on this busy river, conveyed Sir Roger up to Vaux- 
hall. Perhaps, here, on the homeward trip, he was 
rejected by the widow. The dear fellow, it is re- 
corded, out of sentiment merely, kept his clothes un- 
changed in the fashion of this season of his disappoint- 
ment. Here, also, was the old bridge across the Fleet. 
Here was Drury Lane where Garrick acted. Tender 



I PLAN A VACATION 



hearts, they say, in pit and stall, fluttered to his 
Romeo, and sighed their souls across the candles. On 
this muddy curb link-boys waited when the fog was 
thick. Here the footmen bawled for chairs. 

But there are bookshops still in Charing Cross 
Road. And, for frivolous moments, haberdashery is 
offered in Bond Street and vaudeville in Leicester 
Square. 

And then on a supreme morning we pack our ruck- 
sacks. 

It was a grievous oversight that Christian failed to 
tell us what clothing he carried in his pack. We know 
it was a heavy burden, for it dragged him in the mire. 
But did he carry slippers to ease his feet at night? 
And what did the Pardoner put inside his wallet? 
Surely the Wife of Bath was supplied with a powder- 
puff and a fresh taffeta to wear at the journey's end. 
I could, indeed, spare Christian one or two of his 
encounters for knowledge of his wardrobe. These 
homely details are of interest. The mad Knight of 
La Mancha, we are told, mortgaged his house and laid 
out a pretty sum on extra shirts. Stevenson, also, 
tells us the exact gear that he loaded on his donkey, 
but what did Marco Polo carry? And Munchausen 
and the Wandering Jew ? I have skimmed their pages 
vainly for a hint. 

For myself, I shall take an extra suit of under- 
wear and another flannel shirt, a pair of stockings, a 
rubber cape of lightest weight that falls below the 
knees, slippers, a shaving-kit and brushes. I shall 



IpO HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

wash my linen at night and hang it from my window, 
where it shall wave like an admiral's flag to show that 
I sleep upon the premises. I shall replace it as it 
wears. And I shall take a book, not to read but to 
have ready on the chance. I once carried the Book 
of Psalms, but it was Nick Carter I read, which I 
bought in a tavern parlor, fifteen pages missing, from 
a fat lady who served me beer. 

We run to the window for a twentieth time. It has 
rained all night, but the man in the lift was hopeful 
when we came up from breakfast. We believe him; as 
if he sat on a tower with a spy-glass on the clouds. 
We cherish his tip as if it came from ^olus himself, 
holding the winds in leash. 

And now a streak of yellowish sky — London's sub- 
stitute for blue — shows in the west. 

We pay our bill. We scatter the usual silver. 
Several senators in uniform bow us down the steps. 
We hale a bus in Trafalgar Square. We climb to the 
top — to the front seat with full prospect. The Hay- 
market. Sandwich men with weary step announce a 
vaudeville. We snap our fingers at so stale an enter- 
tainment. There are flower-girls in Piccadilly Circus. 
Regent Street. We pass the Marble Arch, near 
which cut-throats were once hanged on the three- 
legged mare of Tyburn. Hammersmith. Brentford. 
The bus stops. It is the end of the route. We have 
ridden out our sixpence. We climb down. We 
adjust our packs and shoe-strings. The road to the 
western country beckons. 



/ PLAN A VACATION U 

My dear sir, perhaps you yourself have planned for 
a landaulet this summer and an English trip. You 
have laid out two swift weeks to make the breathless 
round. You journey from London to Bristol in a 
day. Another day, and you will climb out, stiff of 
leg, among the northern lakes. If then, as you loll 
among the cushions, lapped in luxury, pink and soft — 
if then, you see two men with sticks in hand and packs 
on shoulder, know them for ourselves. We are sing- 
ing on the road to Windsor — to Salisbury, to Stone- 
henge, to the hills of Dorset, to Lyme-Regis, to 
Exeter and the Devon moors. 

It was a shepherd who came with a song to the 
mountain-top. "The sun shone, the bees swept past 
me singing; and I too sang, shouted. World, world, 
I am coming!" 




At a Toy-Shop Window. 

IN this Christmas season, when snowflakes fill the 
air and twilight is the pleasant thief of day, I 
sometimes pause at the window of a toy-shop to 
see what manner of toys are offered to the children. 
It is only five o'clock and yet the sky is dark. The 
night has come to town to do its shopping before the 
stores are shut. The wind has Christmas errands. 

And there is a throng of other shoppers. Fathers 
of families drip with packages and puff after street 
cars. Fat ladies — Now then, all together! — are 
hoisted up. Old ladies are caught in revolving doors. 
And the relatives of Santa Claus — surely no nearer 
than nephews (angemic fellows in faded red coats and 
cotton beards) — pound their kettles for an offering 
toward a Christmas dinner for the poor. 



AT A TOY-SHOP WINDOW iS 

But, also, little children flatten their noses on the 
window of the toy-shop. They point their thumbs 
through their woolly mittens in a sharp rivalry of 
choice. Their unspent nickels itch for large invest- 
ment. Extravagant dimes bounce around their 
pockets. But their ears are cold, and they jiggle on 
one leg against a frosty toe. 

Here in the toy-shop is a tin motor-car. Here is a 
railroad train, with tracks and curves and switches, a 
pasteboard mountain and a tunnel. Here is a steam- 
boat. With a turning of a key it starts for Honolulu 
behind the sofa. The stormy Straits of Madagascar 
lie along the narrow hall. Here in the window, also, 
are beams and girders for a tower. Not since the days 
of Babel has such a vast supply been gathered. And 
there are battleships and swift destroyers and guns 
and armoured tanks. The nursery becomes a danger- 
ous ocean, with submarines beneath the stairs : or it is 
the plain of Flanders and the great war echoes across 
the hearth. Chateau-Thierry is a pattern in the rug 
and the andirons are the towers of threatened Paris. 

But on this Christmas night, as I stand before the 
toy-shop in the whirling storm, the wind brings me 
the laughter of far-off children. Time draws back its 
sober curtain. The snow of thirty winters is piled in 
my darkened memory, but I hear shrill voices across 
the night. 

Once upon a time — in the days when noses and 
tables were almost on a level, and manhood had 
wavered from kilts to pants buttoning at the side — 



HINTS TO PILGRIMS 



once there was a great chest which was lodged in a 
closet behind a sitting-room. It was from this closet 
that the shadows came at night, although at noon 
there was plainly a row of hooks with comfortable 
winter garments. And there were drawers and 
shelves to the ceiling where linen was kept, and a cup- 
board for cough-syrup and oily lotions for chapped 
hands. A fragrant paste, also, was spread on the tip 
of the little finger, which, when wiggled inside the 
nostril and inhaled, was good for wet feet and snuffles. 
Twice a year these bottles were smelled all round and 
half of them discarded. It was the ragman who 
bought them, a penny to the bottle. He coveted 
chiefly, however, lead and iron, and he thrilled to old 
piping as another man thrills to Brahms. He was a 
sly fellow and, unless Annie looked sharp, he put his 
knee against the scale. 

But at the rear of the closet, beyond the lamplight, 
there was a chest where playing-blocks were kept. 
There were a dozen broken sets of various shapes and 
sizes — the deposit and remnant of many years. 

These blocks had once been covered with letters and 
pictures. They had conspired to teach us. C had 
stood for cat. D announced a dog. Learning had 
put on, as it were, a sugar coat for pleasant swallow- 
ing. The arid heists teased us to mount by an easy 
slope. But we scraped away the letters and the 
pictures. Should a holiday, we thought, be ruined by 
insidious instruction? Must a teacher's wagging 
finger always come among us ? It was sufficient that 



AT A TOY-SHOP WINDOW 4-5 

five blocks end to end made a railway car, with finger- 
blocks for platforms ; that three blocks were an engine, 
with a block on top to be a smokestack. We had no 
toy mountain and pasteboard tunnel, as in the soft 
fashion of the present, but we jacked the rug with 
blocks up hill and down, and pushed our clanking 
trains through the hollow underneath. It was an 
added touch to build a castle on the summit. A spool 
on a finger-block was the Duke himself on horseback, 
hunting across his sloping acres. 

There was, also, in the chest, a remnant of iron coal- 
cars with real wheels. Their use was too apparent. 
A best invention was to turn playthings from an 
obvious design. So we placed one of the coal-cars 
under the half of a folding checkerboard and by 
adding masts and turrets and spools for guns we built 
a battleship. This could be sailed all round the room, 
on smooth seas where the floor was bare, but it pitched 
and tossed upon a carpet. If it came to port battered 
by the storm, should it be condemned like a ship that 
is broken on a sunny river? Its plates and rivets had 
been tested in a tempest. It had skirted the headlands 
at the staircase and passed the windy Horn. 

Or perhaps we built a fort upon the beach before 
the fire. It was a pretty warfare between ship and 
fort, with marbles used shot and shot in turn. A 
lucky marble toppled the checkerboard off its balance 
and wrecked the ship. The sailors, after scrambling 
in the water, put to shore on flat blocks from the boat 
deck and were held as prisoners until supper, in the 



4,6 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

dungeons of the fort. It was in the sitting-room that 
we played these games, under the family's feet. They 
moved above our sport like a race of tolerant giants ; 
but when callers came, we were brushed to the rear of 
the house. 

Spools were men. Thread was their short and sub- 
sidiary use. Their larger life was given to our armies. 
We had several hundred of them threaded on long 
strings on the closet-hooks. But if a great campaign 
was planned — if the Plains of Abraham were to be 
stormed or Cornwallis captured — our recruiting ser- 
geants runmiaged in the drawers of the sewing- 
machine for any spool that had escaped the draft. Or 
we peeked into mother's work-box, and if a spool was 
almost empty, we suddenly became anxious about our 
buttons. Sometimes, when a great spool was needed 
for a general, mother wound the thread upon a piece 
of cardboard. General Grant had carried black silk. 
Napoleon had been used on trouser-patches. And 
my grandmother and a half-dozen aunts and elder 
cousins did their bit and plied their needles for the 
war. In this regard grandfather was a slacker, but 
he directed the battle from the sofa with his crutch. 

Toothpicks were guns. Every soldier had a gun. 
If he was hit by a marble in the battle and the tooth- 
pick remained in place, he was only wounded ; but he 
was dead if the toothpick fell out. Of each two men 
wounded, by Hague Convention, one recovered for 
the next engagement. 

Of course we had other toys. Lead soldiers in 



AT A TOY-SHOP WINDOW 1^7 

cocked hats came down the chimney and were mar- 
shaled in the Christmas dawn. A whole Continental 
Army lay in paper sheets, to be cut out with scissors. 
A steam engine with a coil of springs and key fur- 
nished several rainy holidays. A red wheel-barrow 
supplied a short fury of enjoyment. There were 
sleds and skates, and a printing press on which we 
printed the milkman's tickets. The memory still 
lingers that five cents, in those cheap days, bought a 
pint of cream. There was, also, a castle with a prin- 
cess at a window. Was there no prince to climb her 
trellis and bear her off beneath the moon? It had 
happened so in Astolat. The princes of the gorgeous 
East had wooed, also, in such a fashion. Or perhaps 
this was the very castle that the wicked Kazrac lifted 
across the Chinese mountains in the night, cheating 
Aladdin of his bride. It was a rather clever idea, as 
things seem now in this time of general shortage, to 
steal a lady, house and all, not forgetting the cook 
and laundress. But one day a little girl with dark 
hair smiled at me from next door and gave me a 
Christmas cake, and in my dreams thereafter she 
became the princess in my castle. 

We had stone blocks with arches and round columns 
that were too delicate for the hazard of siege and 
battle. Once, when a playmate had scarlet fever, we 
lent them to him for his convalescence. Afterwards, 
against contagion, we left them for a month under a 
bush in the side yard. Every afternoon we wet them 
with a garden hose. Did not Noah's flood purify the 



Ji,8 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

world ? It would be a stout microbe, we thought, that 
could survive the deluge. At last we lifted out the 
blocks at arm's length. We smelled them for any- 
lurking fever. They were damp to the nose and 
smelled like the cement under the back porch. But 
the contagion had vanished like Noah's wicked 
neighbors. 

But store toys always broke. Wheels came off. 
Springs were snapped. Even the princess faded at 
her castle window. 

Sometimes a toy, when it was broken, arrived at a 
larger usefulness. Although I would not willingly 
forget my velocipede in its first gay youth, my 
memory of sharpest pleasure reverts to its later days, 
when one of its rear wheels was gone. It had been 
jammed in an accident against the piano. It has 
escaped me whether the piano survived the jolt; but 
the velocipede was in ruins. When the wheel came off 
the brewery wagon before our house and the kegs 
rolled here and there, the wreckage was hardly so 
complete. Three spokes were broken and the hub was 
cracked. At first, it had seemed that the day of my 
velocipede was done. We laid it on its side and tied 
the hub with rags. It looked like a jaw with tooth- 
ache. Then we thought of the old baby-carriage in 
the storeroom. Perhaps a transfusion of wheels was 
possible. We conveyed upstairs a hammer and a saw. 
It was a wobbling and impossible experiment. But 
at the top of the house there was a kind of race-track 
around the four posts of the attic. With three 



AT A TOY-SHOP WINDOW 49 

wheels complete, we had been forced to ride with 
caution at the turns or be pitched against the sloping 
rafters. We now discovered that a missing wheel 
gave the necessary tilt for speed. I do not recall that 
the pedals worked. We legged it on both sides. Ten 
times around was a race ; and the audience sat on the 
ladder to the roof and held a watch with a second- 
hand for records. 

Ours was a roof that was flat in the center. On 
winter days, when snow would pack, we pelted the 
friendly milkman. Ours, also, was a cellar that was 
lost in darkened mazes. A blind area off the laundry, 
where the pantry had been built above, seemed to be 
the opening of a cavern. And we shuddered at the 
sights that must meet the candle of the furnaceman 
when he closed the draught at bedtime. 

Abandoned furniture had uses beyond a first in- 
tention. A folding-bed of ours closed to about the 
shape of a piano. When the springs and mattress 
were removed it was a house with a window at the 
end where a wooden flap let down. Here sat the 
Prisoner of Chillon, with a clothes-line on his ankle. 
A pile of old furniture in the attic, covered with a 
cloth, became at twilight a range of mountains with a 
gloomy valley at the back. I still believe — for so does 
fancy wanton with my thoughts — that Aladdin's cave 
opens beneath those walnut bed-posts, that the cavern 
of jewels needs but a dusty search on hands and knees. 
The old house, alas, has come to foreign use. Does no 
one now climb the attic steps? Has time worn down 



50 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

the awful Caucasus? No longer is there children's 
laughter on the stairs. The echo of their feet sleeps at 
last in the common day. 

Nor must furniture, of necessity, be discarded. 
We dived from the footboard of our bed into a surf 
of pillows. We climbed its headboard like a mast, 
and looked for pirates on the sea. A sewing-table 
with legs folded flat was a sled upon the stairs. Must 
I do more than hint that two bed-slats make a pair 
of stilts, and that one may tilt like King Arthur with 
the wash-poles? Or who shall fix a narrow use for 
the laundry tubs, or put a limit on the coal-hole ? And 
step-ladders ! There are persons who consider a step- 
ladder as a menial. This is an injustice to a giddy 
creature that needs but a holiday to show its metal. 
On Thursday afternoons, when the cook was out, you 
would never know it for the same thin creature that 
goes on work-days with a pail and cleans the windows. 
It is a tower, a shining lighthouse, a crowded grand- 
stand, a circus, a ladder to the moon. 

But perhaps, my dear young sir, you are so lucky 
as to possess a smaller and inferior brother who frets 
with ridicule. He is a toy to be desired above a red 
velocipede. I offer you a hint. Print upon a paper 
in bold, plain letters — sucking the lead for extra 
blackness — that he is afraid of the dark, that he likes 
the girls, that he is a butter-fingers at baseball and 
teacher's pet and otherwise contemptible. Paste the 
paper inside the glass of the bookcase, so that the 
insult shows. Then lock the door and hide the key. 



AT A TOY-SHOP WINDOW 51 

Let him gaze at this placard of his weakness during 
a rainy afternoon. But I caution you to secure the 
keys of all similar glass doors — of the china closet, of 
the other bookcase, of the knick-knack cabinet. Let 
him stew in his iniquity without chance of retaliation. 

But perhaps, in general, your brother is inclined to 
imitate you and be a tardy pattern of your genius. 
He apes your fashion in suspenders, the tilt of your 
cap, your method in shinny. If you crouch in a barrel 
in hide-and-seek, he crowds in too. You wag your 
head ftom side to side on your bicycle in the manner 
of Zimmerman, the champion. Your brother wags 
his, too. You spit in your catcher's mit, like Kelly, 
the ten-thousand-dollar baseball beauty. Your 
brother spits in his mit, too. These things are un- 
bearable. If you call him "sloppy" when his face is 
dirty, he merely passes you back the insult unchanged. 
If you call him "sloppy-two-times," still he has no 
invention. You are justified now to call him "nigger" 
and to cuff him to his place. 

Tagging is his worst offense — ^tagging along behind 
when you are engaged on serious business. "Now 
then, sonny," you say, "run home. Get nurse to blow 
your nose." Or you bribe him with a penny to mind 
his business. 

I must say a few words about paper-hangers, 
although they cannot be considered as toys or play- 
things by any rule of logic. There is something rather 
jolly about having a room papered. The removal of 
the pictures shows how the old paper looked before 



HINTS TO PILGRIMS 



it faded. The furniture is pushed into an agreeable 
confusion in the hall. A rocker seems starting for 
the kitchen. The great couch goes out the window. 
A chair has climbed upon a table to look about. It 
needs but an alpenstock to clamber on the bookcase. 
The carpet marks the places where the piano legs 
came down. 

And the paper-hanger is a rather jolly person. He 
sings and whistles in the empty room. He keeps to 
a tune, day after day, until you know it. He slaps his 
brush as if he liked his work. It is a sticky, splashing, 
sloshing slap. Not even a plasterer deals in more in- 
teresting material. And he settles down on you with 
ladders and planks as if a circus had moved in. After 
hours, when he is gone, you climb on his planking and 
cross Niagara, as it were, with a cane for balance. To 
this day I think of paper-hangers as a kindly race of 
men, who sing in echoing rooms and eat pie and pickles 
for their lunch. Except for their Adam's apples — got 
with gazing at the ceiling — surely not the wicked 
apple of the Garden — I would wish to be a paper- 
hanger. 

Plumbers were a darker breed, who chewed tobacco 
fetched up from their hip-pockets. They were 
enemies of the cook by instinct, and they spat in dark 
corners. We once found a cake of their tobacco when 
they were gone. We carried it to the safety of the 
furnace-room and bit into it in turn. It was of a 
sweetish flavor of licorice that was not unpleasant. 
But the sin was too enormous for our comfort. 



AT A TOY-SHOP WINDOW 53 

But in November, when days were turning cold 
and hands were chapped, our parents' thoughts ran to 
the kindling-pile, to stock it for the winter. Now the 
kindling-pile was the best quarry for our toys, because 
it was bought from a washboard factory around the 
corner. Not every child has the good fortune to live 
near a washboard factory. Necessary as washboards 
are, a factory of modest output can supply a county, 
with even a httle dribble for export into neighbor 
counties. Many unlucky children, therefore, live a 
good ten miles off, and can never know the fascinating 
discard of its lathes — the little squares and cubes, the 
volutes and rhythmic flourishes which are cast off in 
manufacture and are sold as kindling. They think a 
washboard is a dull and common thing. To them it 
smacks of Monday. It smells of yellow soap and 
suds. It wears, so to speak, a checkered blouse and 
carries clothes-pins in its mouth. It has perspiration 
on its nose. They do not know, in their pitiable igno- 
rance, the towers and bridges that can be made from 
the scourings of a washboard factory. 

Our washboard factory was a great wooden struc- 
ture that had been built for a roller-skating rink. 
Father and mother, as youngsters in the time of their 
courtship, had cut fancy eights upon the floor. And 
still, in these later days, if you Ustened outside a win- 
dow, you heard a whirling roar, as if perhaps the 
skaters had returned and again swept the corners 
madly. But it was really the sound of machinery that 
you heard, fashioning toys and blocks for us. At 



5^ HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

noonday, comely red- faced girls ate their lunches on 
the window-sills, ready for conversation and acquaint- 
ance. 

And now, for several days, a rumor has been 
running around the house that a wagon of kindling is 
expected. Each afternoon, on our return from school, 
we run to the cellar. Even on baking-day the whiff 
of cookies holds us only for a minute. We wait only 
to stuff our pockets. And at last the great day comes. 
The fresh wood is piled to the ceiling. It is a high 
mound and chaos, without form but certainly not 
void. For there are long pieces for bridges, fiat pieces 
for theatre scenery, tall pieces for towers and grooves 
for marbles. It is a vast quarry for our pleasant use. 
You will please leave us in the twilight, sustained by 
doughnuts, burrowing in the pile, throwing out sticks 
to replenish our chest of blocks. 

And therefore on this Christmas night, as I stand 
before the toy-shop in the whirling storm, the wind 
brings me the laughter of these far-off children. The 
snow of thirty winters is piled in my darkened 
memory, but I hear shrill voices across the night. 



Sic Transit — 

I DO not recall a feeling of greater triumph than 
on last Saturday when I walked off the eight- 
eenth green of the Country Club with my oppo- 
nent four down. I have the card before me now with 
its pleasant row of fives and sixes, and a four, and a 
three. Usually my card has mounted here and there 
to an eight or nine, or I have blown up altogether in 
a sandpit. Like Byron — but, oh, how differently! — 
I have wandered in the pathless wood. Like Ruth 
I have stood in tears amid the alien corn. 

In those old days — only a week ago, but dim al- 
ready (so soon does time wash the memory white) — 
in those old days, if I were asked to make up a four- 
some, some green inferior fellow, a novice who used 
his sister's clubs, was paired against me; or I was 
insulted with two strokes a hole, with three on the long 
hole past the woods. But now I shall ascend to faster 
company. It was my elbow. I now square it and 
cock it forward a bit. And I am cured. Keep your 
head down, Fritzie Boy, I say. Mind your elbow — I 
say it aloud — and I have no trouble. 

There is a creek across the course. Like a thread 
in the woof it cuts the web of nearly every green. It 
is a black strand that puts trouble in the pattern, an 
evil thread from Clotho's ancient loom. Up at the 
sixth hole this creek is merely a dirty rivulet and I can 



56 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

get out of the damned thing — one must write, they 
say, as one talks and not go on stilts — I can get out 
with a niblick by splashing myself a bit. But even 
here, in its tender youth, as it were, the rivulet makes 
all the mischief that it can. Gargantua with his 
nurses was not so great a rogue. It crawls back and 
forth three times before the tee with a kind of jeering 
tongue stuck out. It seems foredoomed from the 
cradle to a villainous course. Farther down, at the 
seventeenth and second holes, which are near together, 
it cuts a deeper chasm. The bank is shale and steep. 
As I drive I feel like a black sinner on the nearer 
shore of Styx, gazing upon the sunny fields of Para- 
dise beyond. I put my caddy at the top of the slope, 
where he sits with his apathetic eye upon the sullen, 
predestined pool. 

But since last Saturday all is different. I sailed 
across on every drive, on every approach. The depths 
beckoned but I heeded not. And, when I walked 
across the bridge, I snapped my fingers in contempt, 
as at a dog that snarls safely on a leash. 

I play best with a niblick. It is not entirely that I 
use it most. (Any day you can hear me bawling to 
my caddy to fetch it behind a bunker or beyond a 
fence. ) Rather, the surface of the blade turns up at 
a reassuring, hopeful angle. Its shining eye seems 
cast at heaven in a prayer. I have had spells, also, of 
fondness for my mashie. It is fluted for a back-spin. 
Except for the click and flight of a prosperous drive I 
know nothing of prettier symmetry than an accurate 



SIC TRANSIT— 57 



approach. But my brassie I consider a reckless crea- 
ture. It has bad direction. It treads not in the 
narrow path. I have driven. Good ! For once I am 
clear of the woods. That white speck on the fairway 
is my ball. But shall my ambition o'erleap itself? 
Shall I select my brassie and tempt twice the gods of 
chance? No! I'll use my mashie. I'll creep up to 
the hole on hands and knees and be safe from trap 
and ditch. 

Has anyone spent more time than I among the 
blackberry bushes along the railroad tracks on the 
eleventh? It is no grossness of appetite. My niblick 
grows hot with its exertions. 

Once our course was not beset with sandpits. In 
those bright days woods and guUey were enough. 
Once clear of the initial obstruction I could roll up 
unimpeded to the green. I practiced a bouncing 
stroke with my putter that offered security at twenty 
yards. But now these approaches are guarded by 
traps. The greens are balanced on little mountains 
with sharp ditches all about. I hoist up from one to 
fall into another. "What a word, my son, has passed 
the barrier of your teeth!" said Athene once to Odys- 
seus. Is the game so ancient? Were there sandpits, 
also, on the hills of stony Ithaca? Or in Ortygia, sea- 
girt ? Was the dear wanderer off his game and fallen 
to profanity? The white- armed nymph Calypso must 
have stuffed her ears. 

But now my troubles are behind me. I have cured 
my elbow of its fault. I keep my head down. My 



58 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

very clubs have taken on a different look since Satur- 
day. I used to remark their nicks against the stones. 
A bit of green upon the heel of my driver showed how 
it was that I went sidewise to the woods. In those 
days I carried the bag spitefully to the shower. 
Could I leave it, I pondered, as a foundling in an 
empty locker? Or should I strangle it? But now all 
is changed. My clubs are servants to my will, kindly, 
obedient creatures that wait upon my nod. Even my 
brassie knows me for its master. And the country 
seems fairer. The valleys smile at me. The creek is 
friendly to my drive. The tall hills skip and clap their 
hands at my approach. My game needs only thought 
and care. My fives will become fours, my sixes sUp 
down to fives. And here and there I shall have a 
three. 

Except for a row of books my mantelpiece is bare. 
Who knows ? Some day I may sweep off a musty row 
of history and set up a silver cup. 

Later — Saturday again. I have just been around 
in 123. Horrible! I was in the woods and in the 
blackberry bushes, and in the creek seven times. My 
envious brassie! My well-beloved mashie! Oh, vile 
conspiracy! Ambition's debt is paid. 123! Now — 
now it's my shoulder. 




The Posture of Authors. 



THERE is something rather pleasantly sug- 
gestive in the fashion employed by many of 
the older writers of inscribing their books from 
their chambers or lodging. It gives them at once 
locality and circumstance. It brings them to our 
common earth and understanding. Thomas Fuller, 
for example, having finished his Church History of 
Britain, addressed his reader in a preface from his 
chambers in Sion College. "May God alone have the 
glory," he writes, "and the ingenuous reader the bene- 
fit, of my endeavors ! which is the hearty desire of Thy 
servant in Jesus Christ, Thomas Fuller." 

One pictures a room in the Tudor style, with oak 
wainscot, tall mullioned windows and leaded glass, a 
deep fireplace and black beams above. Outside, 



60 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 



perhaps, is the green quadrangle of the college, 
cloistered within ancient buildings, with gay wall- 
flowers against the sober stones. Bells answer from 
tower to belfry in agreeable dispute upon the hour. 
They were cast in a quieter time and refuse to bicker 
on a paltry minute. The sunlight is soft and yellow 
with old age. Such a dedication from such a place 
might turn the most careless reader into scholarship. 
In the seat of its leaded windows even the quirk of a 
Latin sentence might find a meaning. Here would be 
a room in which to meditate on the worthies of old 
England, or to read a chronicle of forgotten kings, 
queens, and protesting lovers who have faded into 
night. 

Here we see Thomas Fuller dip his quill and make 
a start. "I have sometimes solitarily pleased myself," 
he begins, and he gazes into the dark shadows of the 
room, seeing, as it were, the pleasant spectres of the 
past. Bishops of Britain, long dead, in stole and 
mitre, forgetful of their solemn office, dance in the 
firelight on his walls. Popes move in dim review 
across his studies and shake a ghostly finger at his 
heresy. The past is not a prude. To her lover she 
reveals her beauty. And the scholar's lamp is her 
marriage torch. 

Nor need it entirely cool our interest to learn that 
Sion College did not slope thus in country fashion to 
the peaceful waters of the Cam, with its fringe of 
trees and sunny meadow; did not possess even a 
gothic tower and cloister. It was built on the site of 



THE POSTURE OF AUTHORS 61 

an ancient priory, Elsing Spital, with almshouses 
attached, a Jesuit library and a college for the clergy. 
It was right in London, down near the Roman wall, 
in the heart of the tangled traffic, and street cries kept 
breaking in — muffins, perhaps, and hot spiced ginger- 
bread and broken glass. I hope, at least, that the 
good gentleman's rooms were up above, somewhat out 
of the clatter, where muffins had lost their shrillness. 
Gingerbread, when distance has reduced it to a pleas- 
ant tune, is not inclined to rouse a scholar from his 
meditation. And even broken glass is blunted on a 
journey to a garret. I hope that the old gentleman 
climbed three flights or more and that a range of 
chimney-pots was his outlook and speculation. 

It seems as if a rather richer flavor were given to a 
book by knowing the circumstance of its composition. 
Not only would we know the complexion of a man, 
whether he "be a black or a fair man," as Addison 
suggests, "of a mild or choleric disposition, married or 
a bachelor," but also in what posture he works and 
what objects meet his eye when he squares his elbows 
and dips his pen. We are concerned whether sun- 
light falls upon his papers or whether he writes in 
shadow. Also, if an author's desk stands at a window, 
we are curious whether it looks on a street, or on a 
garden, or whether it squints blindly against a wall. 
A view across distant hiUs surely sweetens the imagi- 
nation, whereas the clatter of the city gives a shrewder 
twist to fancy. 

And household matters are of proper concern. We 



HINTS TO PILGRIMS 



would like to be informed whether an author works in 
the swirl of the common sitting-room. If he writes 
within earshot of the kitchen, we should know it. 
There has been debate whether a steam radiator chills 
a poet as against an open fire, and whether a plot 
keeps up its giddy pace upon a sweeping day. His- 
tories have balked before a household interruption. 
Novels have been checked by the rattle of a careless 
broom. A smoky chimney has choked the sturdiest 
invention. 

If a plot goes slack perhaps it is a bursted pipe. 
An incessant grocer's boy, unanswered on the back 
porch, has often foiled the wicked Earl in his attempts 
against the beautiful Pomona. Little did you think, 
my dear madam, as you read your latest novel, that 
on the very instant when the heroine, Mrs. Elmira 
Jones, deserted her babies to follow her conscience 
and become a movie actress — that on that very in- 
stant when she slammed the street door, the plumber 
(the author's plumber) came in to test the radiator. 
Mrs. Jones nearly took her death on the steps as she 
waited for the plot to deal with her. Even a Marquis, 
now and then, one of the older sort in wig and ruffles, 
has been left — when the author's ashes have needed 
attention — on his knees before the Lady Emily, 
begging her to name the happy day. 

Was it not Coleridge's cow that calved while he was 
writing "Kubla Khan"? In burst the housemaid with 
the joyful news. And that man from Porlock — men- 
tioned in his letters — who came on business? Did he 



THE POSTURE OF AUTHORS 63 

not despoil the morning of its poetry? Did Words- 
worth's pigs — surely he owned pigs — never get into 
his neighbor's garden and need quick attention? 
Martin Luther threw his inkpot, supposedly, at the 
devil. Is it not more likely that it was at Annie, who 
came to dust? Thackeray is said to have written 
largely at his club, the Garrick or the Athenaeum. 
There was a general stir of feet and voices, but it was 
foreign and did not plague him. A tinkle of glasses 
in the distance, he confessed, was soothing, like a 
waterfall. 

Steele makes no complaint against his wife Prue, 
but he seems to have written chiefly in taverns. In 
the very first paper of the Tatler he gratifies our 
natural curiosity by naming the several coffee-houses 
where he intends to compose his thoughts. "Foreign 
and domestic news," he says, "you will have from 
Saint James's Coffee-House." Learning will proceed 
from the Grecian. But "all accounts of gallantry, 
pleasure and entertainment shall be under the article 
of White's Chocolate-House." In the month of Sep- 
tember, 1705, he continues, a gentleman "was washing 
his teeth at a tavern window in Pall Mall, when a fine 
equipage passed by, and in it, a young lady who 
looked up at him ; away goes the coach — " Away goes 
the beauty, with an alluring smile — rather an am- 
biguous smile, I'm afraid — across her silken shoulder. 
But for the continuation of this pleasant scandal (you 
may be sure that the pretty fellow was quite distracted 



6Ji, HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

from his teeth) one must turn up the yellow pages of 
the Tatler. 

We may suppose that Steele called for pens and 
paper and a sandbox, and took a table in one of 
White's forward windows. He wished no garden 
view or brick wall against the window. We may even 
go so far as to assume that something in the way of 
punch, or canary, or negus luke, my dear, was handy 
at his elbow. His paragraphs are punctuated by the 
gay procession of the street. Here goes a great dandy 
in red heels, with lace at his beard and wrists. Here 
is a scarlet captain who has served with Marlborough 
and has taken a whole regiment of Frenchmen by the 
nose. Here is the Lady Belinda in her chariot, who is 
the pledge of all the wits and poets. That little pink 
ear of hers has been rhymed in a hundred sonnets — 
ear and tear and fear and near and dear. The King 
has been toasted from her slipper. The pretty crea- 
ture has been sitting at ombre for most of the night, 
but now at four of the afternoon she takes the morning 
air with her lap dog. That great hat and feather will 
slay another dozen hearts between shop and shop. She 
is attended by a female dragon, but contrives by acci- 
dent to show an inch or so of charming stocking at 
the curb. Steele, at his window, I'm afraid, forgets 
for the moment his darling Prue and his promise to 
be home. 

There is something rather pleasant in knowing 
where these old authors, who are now almost for- 
gotten, wrote their books. Richardson wrote "Cla- 



THE POSTURE OF AUTHORS 65 

rissa" at Parson's Green. That ought not to interest 
us very much, for nobody reads "Clarissa" now. But 
we can picture the fat little printer reading his daily 
batch of tender letters from young ladies, begging him 
to reform the wicked Lovelace and turn the novel to 
a happy end. For it was issued in parts and so, of 
course, there was no opportunity fo^ young ladies, 
however impatient, to thumb the back pages for the 
plot. 

Richardson wrote "Pamela" at a house called the 
Grange, then in the open country just out of London. 
There was a garden at the back, and a grotto — one of 
the grottoes that had been the fashion for prosperous 
literary gentlemen since Pope had built himself one 
at Twickenham. Here, it is said, Richardson used to 
read his story, day by day, as it was freshly composed, 
to a circle of his lady admirers. Hugh Thompson has 
drawn the picture in delightful silhouette. The ladies 
listen in suspense — perhaps the wicked Master is just 
taking Pamela on his knee — their hands are raised in 
protest. La! The Monster! Their noses are pitched 
up to a high excitement. One old lady hangs her 
head and blushes at the outrage. Or does she cock 
her ear to hear the better? 

Richardson had a kind of rocking-horse in his study 
and he took his exercise so between chapters. We 
may imagine him galloping furiously on the hearth- 
rug, then, quite refreshed, after four or five dishes of 
tea, hiding his villain once more under Pamela's bed. 
Did it never occur to that young lady to lift the 



66 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

valance? Half a dozen times at least he has come 
popping out after she has loosed her stays, once even 
when she has got her stockings off. Perhaps this is 
the dangerous moment when the old lady in the sil- 
houette hung her head and blushed. If Pamela had 
gone rummaging vigorously with a poker beneath her 
bed she could have cooled her lover. 

Goldsmith wrote his books, for the most part, in 
lodgings. We find him starving with the beggars in 
Axe Lane, advancing to Green Arbour Court — send- 
ing down to the cook-shop for a tart to make his 
supper — living in the Temple, as his fortunes mended. 
Was it not at his window in the Temple that he wrote 
part of his "Animated Nature" ? His first chapter — 
four pages — ^is called a sketch of the universe. In 
four pages he cleared the beginning up to Adam. 
Could anything be simpler or easier? The clever 
fellow, no doubt, could have made the universe — 
actually made it out of chaos — stars and moon and 
fishes in the sea — in less than the allotted six days 
and not needed a rest upon the seventh. He could 
have gone, instead, in plum-colored coat — "in full 
fig" — to Vauxhall for a frolic. Goldsmith had 
nothing in particular outside of his window to look at 
but the stone flagging, a pump and a solitary tree. 
Of the whole green earth this was the only living thing. 
For a brief season a bird or two lodged there, and 
you may be sure that Goldsmith put the remnant of 
his crumbs upon the window casement. Perhaps it 
was here that he sent down to the cook-shop for a 



THE POSTURE OF AUTHORS 67 

tart, and he and the birds made a common banquet 
across the glass. 

Poets, depending on their circumstance, are sup- 
posed to write either in garrets or in gardens. 
Browning, it is true, Hved at Casa Guidi, which was 
"yellow with sunshine from morning to evening," and 
here and there a prosperous Byron has a Persian car- 
pet and mahogany desk. But, for the most part, we 
put our poets in garrets, as a cheap place that has the 
additional advantage of being nearest to the moon. 
From these high windows sonnets are thrown, on a 
windy night. Rhymes and fancies are roused by 
gazing on the stars. The rumble of the lower city is 
potent to start a metaphor. "These fringes of lamp- 
light," it is written, ^'struggling up through smoke and 
thousandfold exhalation, some fathoms into the an- 
cient reign of Night, what thinks Bootes of them, as 
he leads his Hunting-dogs over the Zenith in their 
leash of sidereal fire ? That stifled hum of Midnight, 
when Traffic has lain down to rest. ..." 

Here, under a sloping roof, the poet sits, blowing 
at his fingers. Hogarth has drawn him — the Dis- 
tressed Poet — cold and lean and shabby. That 
famous picture might have been copied from the life 
of any of a hundred creatures of "The Dunciad," and, 
with a change of costume, it might serve our^ time as 
well. The poor fellow sits at a broken table in the 
dormer. About him lie his scattered sheets. His 
wife mends his breeches. Outside the door stands a 
woman with the unpaid milk-score. There is not a 



68 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

penny in the place — and for food only half a loaf and 
something brewing in a kettle. You may remember- 
that when Johnson was a young poet, just come to 
London, he lived with Mr. Cave in St. John's Gate. 
When there were visitors he ate his supper behind a 
screen because he was too shabby to show himself. I 
wonder what definition he gave the poet in his dic- 
tionary. If he wrote in his own experience, he put 
him down as a poor devil who was always hungry. 
But Chatterton actually died of starvation in a garret, 
and those other hundred poets of his time and ours 
got down to the bone and took to coughing. Perhaps 
we shall change our minds about that sonnet which we 
tossed lightly to the moon. The wind thrusts a cold 
finger through chink and rag. The stars travel on 
such lonely journeys. The jest loses its relish. Per- 
haps those merry verses to the Christmas — the sleigh 
bells and the roasted goose — perhaps those verses turn 
bitter when written on an empty stomach. 

But do poets ever write in gardens? Swift, who 
was by way of being a poet, built himself a garden- 
seat at Moor Park when he served Sir William 
Temple, but I don't know that he wrote poetry there. 
Rather, it was a place for reading. Pope in his pros- 
perous days wrote at Twickenham, with the sound of 
his artificial waterfall in his ears, and he walked to 
take the air in his grotto along the Thames. But do 
poets really wander beneath the moon to think their 
verses? Do they compose "on summer eve by haunted 
stream"? I doubt whether Gray conceived his Elegy 



THE POSTURE OF AUTHORS 69 

in an actual graveyard. I smell oil. One need 
not see the thing described upon the very moment. 
Shelley wrote of mountains — ^the awful range of Cau- 
casus — but his eye at the time looked on sunny Italy. 
Ibsen wrote of the north when hving in the south. 
When Bunyan wrote of the Delectable Mountains he 
was snug inside a jail. Shakespeare, doubtless, saw 
the giddy cliffs of Dover, the Rialto, the Scottish 
heath, from the vantage of a London lodging. 

Where did Andrew Marvell stand or sit or walk 
when he wrote about gardens ? Wordsworth is said to 
have strolled up and down a gravel path with his eyes 
on the ground. I wonder whether the gardener ever 
broke in — ^if he had a gardener — ^to complain about 
the drouth or how the dandelions were getting the 
better of him. Or perhaps the lawn-mower squeaked 
— if he had a lawn-mower — and threw him off. But 
wasn't it Wordsworth who woke up four times in one 
night and called to his wife for pens and paper lest an 
idea escape him? Surely he didn't take to the garden 
at that time of night in his pajamas with an inkpot. 
But did Wordsworth have a wife? How one forgets! 
Coleridge told Hazlitt that he Uked to compose "walk- 
ing over uneven ground, or breaking through the 
straggling branches of a copse- wood." But then, you 
recall that a calf broke into "Kubla Khan." On that 
particular day, at least, he was snug in his study. 

No, I think that poets may like to sit in gardens 
and smoke their pipes and poke idly with their sticks, 
but when it comes actually to composing they would 



10 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

rather go inside. For even a little breeze scatters 
their papers. No poet wishes to spend his precious 
morning chasing a frisky sonnet across the lawn. 
Even a heavy epic, if lifted by a sudden squall, chal- 
lenges the swiftest foot. He puts his stick on one pile 
and his pipe on another and he holds down loose sheets 
with his thumb. But it is awkward business, and it 
checks the mind in its loftier flight. 

Nor do poets care to suck their pencils too long 
where someone may see them — perhaps Annie at the 
window rolling her pie-crust. And they can't kick 
off their shoes outdoors in the hot agony of composi- 
tion. And also, which caps the argument, a garden 
is undeniably a sleepy place. The bees drone to a 
sleepy tune. The breeze practices a lullaby. Even 
the sunlight is in the common conspiracy. At the 
very moment when the poet is considering Little Miss 
Muffet and how she sat on a tuffet — doubtless in a 
garden, for there were spiders — even at the very 
moment when she sits unsuspectingly at her curds and 
whey, down goes the poet's head and he is fast asleep. 
Sleepiness is the plague of authors. You may remem- 
ber that when Christian — who, doubtless, was an 
author in his odd moments — came to the garden and 
the Arbour on the Hill Difficulty, "he pulled his Roll 
out of his bosom and read therein to his comfort. . . . 
Thus pleasing himself awhile, he at last fell into a 
slumber." I have no doubt — other theories to the con- 
trary — that "Kubla Khan" broke off suddenly because 
Coleridge dropped off to sleep. A cup of black coffee 



THE POSTURE OF AUTHORS 71 

might have extended the poem to another stanza. 
Mince pie would have stretched it to a volume. Is not 
Shakespeare allowed his forty winks? Has it not 
been written that even the worthy Homer nods ? 

"A pleasing land of drowsyhed it was: 
Of dreams that wave before the half -shut eye; 
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass, 
For ever flushing round a summer sky." 

No, if one has a bit of writing to put out of the way, 
it is best to stay indoors. Choose an uncomfortable, 
straight-backed chair. Toss the sheets into a careless 
litter. And if someone will pay the milk- score and 
keep the window mended, a garret is not a bad place 
in which to write. 

Novelists — unless they have need of history — can 
write anywhere, I suppose, at home or on a journey. 
In the burst of their hot imagination a knee is a desk. 
I have no doubt that Mr. Hugh Walpole, touring in 
this country, contrives to write a bit even in a Pull- 
man. The ingenious Mr. Oppenheim surely dashes off 
a plot on the margin of the menu-card between meat 
and salad. We know that "Pickwick Papers" was 
written partly in hackney coaches while Dickens was 
jolting about the town. 

An essayist, on the other hand, needs a desk and a 
library near at hand. Because an essay is a kind of 
back-stove cookery. A novel needs a hot fire, so to 
speak. A dozen chapters bubble in their turn above 
the reddest coals, while an essay simmers over a little 



72 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

flame. Pieces of this and that, an odd carrot, as it 
were, a left potato, a pithy bone, discarded trifles, are 
tossed in from time to time to enrich the composition. 
Raw paragraphs, when they have stewed all night, at 
last become tender to the fork. An essay, therefore, 
cannot be written hurriedly on the knee. Essayists, 
as a rule, chew their pencils. Their desks are large 
and are always in disorder. There is a stack of books 
on the clock shelf. Others are pushed under the bed. 
Matches, pencils and bits of paper mark a hundred 
references. When an essayist goes out from his 
lodging he wears the kind of overcoat that holds a 
book in every pocket. His sagging pockets proclaim 
him. He is a bulging person, so stuffed, even in his 
dress, with the ideas of others that his own leanness is 
concealed. An essayist keeps a notebook, and he 
thumbs it for forgotten thoughts. Nobody is safe 
from him, for he steals from everyone he meets. 

An essayist is not a mighty traveler. He does not 
run to grapple with a roaring lion. He desires neither 
typhoon nor tempest. He is content in his harbor to 
listen to the storm upon the rocks, if now and then, by 
a lucky chance, he can shelter someone from the wreck. 
His hands are not red with revolt against the world. 
He has glanced upon the thoughts of many men ; and 
as opposite philosophies point upon the truth, he is 
modest with his own and tolerant toward the opinion 
of others. He looks at the stars and, knowing in what 
a dim immensity we travel, he writes of little things 
beyond dispute. There are enough to weep upon the 



THE POSTURE OF AUTHORS 73 

shadows, he, like a dial, marks the light. The small 
clatter of the city beneath his window, the cry of 
peddlers, children chalking their games upon the pave- 
ment, laundry dancing on the roofs and smoke in the 
winter's wind — these are the things he weaves into the 
fabric of his thoughts. Or sheep upon the hillside — 
if his window is so lucky — or a sunny meadow, is a 
profitable speculation. And so, while the novelist is 
struggling up a dizzy mountain, straining through the 
tempest to see the kingdoms of the world, behold the 
essayist snug at home, content with little sights. He 
is a kind of poet — a poet whose wings are clipped. He 
flaps to no great heights and sees neither the devil, the 
seven oceans nor the twelve apostles. He paints old 
thoughts in shiny varnish and, as he is able, he mends 
small habits here and there. And therefore, as essay- 
ists stay at home, they are precise — almost amorous 
— in the posture and outlook of their writing. Leigh 
Hunt wished a great library next his study. "But for 
the study itself," he writes, "give me a small snug 
place, almost entirely walled with books. There 
should be only one window in it looking upon trees." 
How the precious fellow scorns the mountains and the 
ocean! He has no love, it seems, for typhoons and 
roaring lions. "I entrench myself in my books," he 
continues, "equally against sorrow and the weather. 
If the wind comes through a passage, I look about to 
see how I can fence it off by a better disposition of my 
movables." And by movables he means his books. 
These were his screen against cold and trouble. But 



7Jt, HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

Leigh Hunt had been in prison for his political beliefs. 
He had grappled with his lion. So perhaps, after all, 
my argument fails. 

Mr. Edmund Gosse had a different method to the 
same purpose. He "was so anxious to fly all outward 
noise" that he desired a library apart from the house. 
Maybe he had had some experience with Annie and 
her clattering broomstick. "In my sleep," he writes, 
" '"WTiere dreams are multitude,' I sometimes fancy 
that one day I shall have a library in a garden. The 
phrase seems to contain the whole felicity of man. . . . 
It sounds like having a castle in Spain, or a sheep- 
walk in Arcadia." 

Montaigne's study was a tower, walled all about 
with books. At his table in the midst he was the 
general focus of their wisdom. Hazlitt wrote much at 
an inn at Winterslow, with Salisbury Plain around 
the corner of his view. Now and then, let us hope, 
when the London coach was due, he received in his 
nostrils a savory smell from the kitchen stove. I 
taste pepper, sometimes, and sharp sauces in his 
writing. Stevenson, except for ill-health and a love 
of the South Seas (here was the novelist showing 
himself), would have preferred a windy perch over- 
looking Edinburgh. 

It does seem as if a rather richer flavor were given 
to a book by knowing the circumstance of its compo- 
sition. Consequently, readers, as they grow older, 
turn more and more to biography. It is chiefly not the 
biographies that deal with great crises and events, but 



THE POSTURE OF AUTHORS 75 

rather the biographies that are concerned with small 
circumstance and agreeable gossip, that attract them 
most. The life of Gladstone, with its hard facts of 
British policy, is all very well ; but Mr. Lucas's life of 
Lamb is better. Who would willingly neglect the 
record of a Thursday night at Inner Temple Lane? 
In these pages Talfourd, Procter, Hazlitt and Hunt 
have written their memories of these gatherings. It 
was to his partner at whist, as he was dealing, that 
Lamb once said, "If dirt was trumps, what hands you 
would hold!" Nights of wit and friendly banter! 
Who would not crowd his ears with gossip of that 
mirthful company? — George Dyer, who forgot his 
boots until half way home (the dear fellow grew for- 
getful as the smoking jug went round) — Charles 
Lamb feeling the stranger's bumps. Let the Empire 
totter! Let Napoleon fall! Africa shall be parceled 
as it may. Here will we sit until the cups are empty. 

Lately, in a bookshop at the foot of Cornhill, I fell 
in with an old scholar who told me that it was his prac- 
tice to recommend four books, which, taken end on 
end, furnished the general history of English letters 
from the Restoration to a time within our own 
memory. These books were "Pepys' Diary," "Bos- 
well's Johnson," the "Diary and Letters of Madame 
d'Arblay" and the "Diary of Crabb Robinson." 

Beginning almost with the days of Cromwell here is 
a chain of pleasant gossip across the space of more 
than two hundred years. Perhaps, at the first, there 
were old fellows still alive who could remember 



76 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

Shakespeare — who still sat in chimney corners and 
babbled through their toothless gums of Blackfriars 
and the Globe. And at the end we find a reference to 
President Lincoln and the freeing of the slaves. 

Here are a hundred authors — perhaps a thousand — 
tucking up their cuffs, looking out from their familiar 
windows, scribbling their large or trivial masterpieces. 




After-Dinner Pleasantries, 



THERE is a shop below Fourteenth Street, 
somewhat remote from fashion, that sells 
nothing but tricks for amateur and parlor use. 
It is a region of cobblers, tailors and small grocers. 
Upstairs, locksmiths and buttonhole cutters look 
through dusty windows on the L, which, under some 
dim influence of the moon, tosses past the buildings 
here its human tide, up and down, night and morning. 
The Trick Shop flatters itself on its signboard that 
it carries the largest line of its peculiar trickery on the 
western hemisphere — hinting modestly that Baluchis- 
tan, perhaps, or Mesopotamia (where magic might be 
supposed to flourish) may have an equal stock. The 
shop does not proclaim its greatness to the casual 
glance. Its enormity of fraud oifers no hint to the 



78 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

unsuspecting curb. There must be caverns and 
cellars at the rear — a wealth of baffling sham un- 
rumored to the street, shelves sagging with agreeable 
deception, huge bales of sleight-of-hand and musty- 
barrels of old magic. 

But to the street the shop reveals no more than a 
small show-window, of a kind in which licorice-sticks 
and all-day-suckers might feel at home. It is a win- 
dow at which children might stop on their way from 
school and meditate their choice, fumbling in their 
pockets for their wealth. 

I have stood at this window for ten minutes to- 
gether. There are cards for fortune tellers and 
manuals of astrology, decks with five aces and marked 
backs, and trick hats and boxes with false bottoms. 
There are iron cigars to be offered to a friend, and 
bleeding fingers, and a device that makes a noise like 
blowing the nose, "only much louder.'* Books of 
magic are displayed, and conjurers' outfits — shell 
games and disappearing rabbits. There is a line of 
dribble-glasses — a humorous contrivance with little 
holes under the brim for spilling water down the front 
of an unwary guest. This, it is asserted, breaks the 
social ice and makes a timid stranger feel at home. 
And there are puzzle pictures, beards for villains and 
comic masks — Satan himself, and other painted faces 
for Hallowe'en. 

Some persons, of course, can perform their parlor 
tricks without this machinery and appliance. I know a 
gifted fellow who can put on the expression of an 



AFTER-DINNER PLEASANTRIES 79 

idiot. Or he wrinkles his face into the semblance of 
eighty years, shakes with palsy and asks his tired wife 
if she will love him when he's old. Again he puts a 
coffee cup under the shoulder of his coat and plays 
the humpback. On a special occasion he mounts a 
table — or two kitchen chairs become his stage — and 
recites Richard and the winter of his discontent. He 
needs only a pillow to smother Desdemona. And then 
he opens an imaginary bottle — the popping of the 
cork, the fizzing, the gurgle when it pours. Some- 
times he is a squealing pig caught under a fence, and 
sometimes two steamboats signaling with their 
whistles in a fog. 

I know a young woman — of the newer sort — ^who 
appears to swallow a lighted cigarette, with smoke 
coming from her ears. This was once a man's trick, 
but the progress of the weaker sex has shifted it. On 
request, she is a nervous lady with a fear of monkeys, 
taking five children to the circus. She is Camille on 
her deathbed. I know a man, too, who can give the 
Rebel yell and stick a needle, full length, into his leg. 
The pulpy part above his knee seems to make an 
excellent pincushion. And then there is the old loco- 
motive starting on a slippery grade (for beginners in 
entertainment), the hand-organ man and his infested 
monkey (a duet), the chicken that is chased around 
the barnyard, Hamlet with the broken pallet (this is 
side-splitting in any company) and Moriarty on the 
telephone. I suppose our best vaudeville performers 



80 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

were once amateurs themselves around the parlor 
lamp. 

And there is Jones, too, who plays the piano. 
Jones, when he is asked, sits at the keyboard and 
fingers little runs and chords. He seems to be think- 
ing which of a hundred pieces he will play. "What 
will you have?" he asks. And a fat man wants 
"William Tell," and a lady with a powdered nose asks 
for "Bubbles." But Jones ignores both and says, 
"Here's a little thing of Schumann. It's a charming 
bit." On the other hand, when Brown is asked to 
sing, it is generally too soon after dinner. Brown, 
evidently, takes his food through his windpipe, and 
it is, so to speak, a one-way street. He can hardly 
permit the ascending "Siegfried" to squeeze past the 
cheese and crackers that still block the crowded 
passage. 

There is not a college dinner without the mockery of 
an eccentric professor. A wag will catch the pointing 
of his finger, his favorite phrase. Is there a lawyers' 
dinner without its imitation of Harry Lauder? Isn't 
there always someone who wants to sing "It's Nice to 
Get Up in the Mornin'," and trot up and down with 
twinkling legs? Plumbers on their lodge nights, I 
am told, have their very own Charlie Chaplin. And 
I suppose that the soda clerks' union — ^the dear crea- 
tures with their gum — ^has its local Mary Pickford, 
ready with a scene from Polly anna. What jolly 
dinners dentists must have, telling one another in 
dialect how old Mrs. Finnigan had her molars out! 



AFTER-DINNER PLEASANTRIES 81 

Forceps and burrs are their unwearied jest across the 
years. When they are together and the doors are 
closed, how they must f rohc with our weakness I 

And undertakers! Even they, I am informed, 
throw off their solemn countenance when they gather 
in convention. Their carnation and mournful smile 
are gone — that sober gesture that waves the chilly 
relations to the sitting-room. But I wonder whether 
their dismal shop doesn't cling always just a bit to 
their mirth and songs. That poor duffer in the poem 
who asked to be laid low, wrapped in his tarpaulin 
jacket — surely, undertakers never sing of him. They 
must look at him with disfavor for his cheap proposal. 
He should have roused for a moment at the end, with 
a request for black broadcloth and silver handles. 

I once sat with an undertaker at a tragedy. He was 
of a hvely sympathy in the earlier parts and seemed 
hopeful that the hero would come through alive. But 
in the fifth act, when the clanking army was defeated 
in the wings and Brutus had fallen on his sword, 
then, unmistakably his thoughts turned to the peculiar 
viewpoint of his profession. In fancy he sat already 
in the back parlor with the grieving Mrs. Brutus, 
arranging for the music. 

To undertakers, Caesar is always dead and turned 
to clay. Falstaff is just a fat old gentleman who 
drank too much sack, a' babbled of green fields and 
then needed professional attention. Perhaps at the 
very pitch of their meetings when the merry glasses 
have been three times filled, they pledge one another in 



HINTS TO PILGRIMS 



what they are pleased to call the embalmers' fluid. 
This jest grows rosier with the years. For these many 
centuries at their banquets they have sung that it was a 
cough that carried him off, that it was a coffin — Now 
then, gentlemen! All together for the chorus! — that 
it was a coflin they carried him off in. 

I dined lately with a man who could look like a 
weasel. When this was applauded, he made a face 
like the Dude of Palmer Coal's Brownies, Even 
Susan, the waitress, who knows her place and takes a 
jest soberly, broke down at the pantry door. We 
could hear her dishes rattling in convulsions in the 
sink. And then our host played the insect with his 
fingers on the tablecloth, smelling a spot of careless 
gravy from the roast with his long thin middle finger. 
He caught the habit that insects have of waving their 
forward legs. 

I still recall an uncle who could wiggle his ears. 
He did it every Christmas and Thanksgiving T)ay, 
It was as much a part of the regular program as the 
turkey and the cranberries. It was a feature of his 
engaging foolery to pretend that the wiggle was pro- 
duced by rubbing the stomach, and a circle of us 
youngsters sat around him, rubbing our expectant 
stomachs, waiting for the miracle. A cousin brought 
a guitar and played the "Spanish Fandango" while 
we sat around the fire, sleepy after dinner. And there 
was a maiden aunt with thin blue fingers, who played 
waltzes while we danced, and she nodded and slept to 
the drowsy sound of her own music. 



AFTER-DINNER PLEASANTRIES 83 

Of my own after-dinner pleasantries I am modest. 
I have only one trick. Two. I can recite the fur- 
bearing animals of North America — the bison, the 
bear, the wolf, the seal, and sixteen others — and I can 
go downstairs behind the couch for the cider. This 
last requires little skill. As the books of magic say, 
it is an easy and baffling trick. With every step you 
crook your legs a little more, until finally you are on 
your knees, hunched together, and your head has 
disappeared from view. You reverse the business 
coming up, with tray and glasses. 

But these are my only tricks. There is a Brahms 
waltz that I once had hopes of, but it has a hard run 
on the second page. I can never get my thumb under 
in time to make connections. My best voice, too, 
covers only five notes. You cannot do much for the 
neighbors with that cramped kind of range. "A 
Tailor There Sat on His Window Ledge" is one of 
the few tunes that fall inside my poverty. He calls to 
his wife, you may remember, to bring him his old 
cross-bow, and there is a great Zum! Zum! up and 
down in the bass until ready, before the chorus starts. 
On a foggy morning I have quite a formidable voice 
for those Zums. But after-dinner pleasantries are 
only good at night and then my bass is thin. "A 
Sailor's Life, Yo, Ho!" is a very good tune but it 
goes up to D, and I can sing it only when I am reck- 
less of circumstance, or when I am taking ashes from 
the furnace. I know a lady who sings only at her 
sewing-machine. She finds a stirring accompaniment 



8^ HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

in the whirling of the wheel. Others sing best in tiled 
bathrooms. Sitting in warm and soapy water their 
voices swell to Caruso's. Laundresses, I have noticed, 
are in lustiest voice at their tubs, where their arms 
keep a vigorous rhythm on the scrubbing-board. But 
I choose ashes. I am little short of a Valkyr, despite 
my sex, when I rattle the furnace grate. 

With hymns I can make quite a showing in church 
if the bass part keeps to a couple of notes. I pound 
along melodiously on some convenient low note and 
slide up now and then, by a happy instinct, when the 
tune seems to require it. The dear little lady, who 
sits in front of me, turns what I am pleased to think 
is an appreciative ear, and now and then, for my sup- 
port, she throws in a pretty treble. But I have no 
tolerance with a bass part that undertakes a flourish 
and climbs up behind the tenor. This is mere egotism 
and a desire to shine. "Art thou there, true-penny? 
You hear this fellow in the cellarage?" That is the 
proper bass. 

Dear me! Now that I recall it, we have guests — 
guests tonight for dinner. Will I be asked to sing? 
Am I in voice? I tum-a-lum a little, up and down, for 
experiment. The roar of the subway drowns this 
from my neighbors, but by holding my hand over my 
mouth I can hear it. Is my low F in order? No — 
undeniably, it is not. Thin. And squeaky. The 
Zums would never do. And that fast run in Brahms ? 
Can I slip through it? Or will my thumb, as usual, 
catch and stall? Have my guests seen me go down- 



AFTER-DINNER PLEASANTRIES 85 

stairs behind the couch for the cider? Have they 
heard the fur-bearing animals — ^the bison, the bear, 
the wolf, the seal, the beaver, the otter, the fox and 
raccoon? 

Perhaps — ^perhaps it will be better to stop at the 
Trick Shop and buy a dribble-glass and a long black 
beard to amuse my guests. 




Little Candles. 



HIGH conceit of one's self and a sureness of 
one's opinion are based so insecurely in ex- 
perience that one is perplexed how their 
slight structure stands. One marvels why these em- 
phatic builders trust again their glittering towers. 
Surely anyone who looks into himself and sees its void 
or malformation ought by rights to shrink from adula- 
tion of self, and his own opinion should appear to him 
merely as one candle among a thousand. 

And yet this conceit of self outlasts innumerable 
failures, and any new pinnacle that is set up, neglect- 
ing the broken rubble on the ground and all the wreck- 
age at the base, boasts again of its sure communion 
with the stars. A man, let us say, has gone headlong 
from one formula of belief into another. In each, for 
a time, he burns with a hot conviction. Then his faith 
cools. His god no longer nods. But just when you 



LITTLE CANDLES 87 

think that failure must have brought him modesty, 
again he amazes you with the golden prospect of a 
new adventure. He has climbed in his life a hundred 
hillocks, thinking each to be a mountain. He has jour- 
neyed on many paths, but always has fallen in a bog. 
Conceit is a thin bubble in the wind, it is an empty 
froth and breath, yet, hammered into ship-plates, it 
defies the U-boat. 

On every sidewalk, also, we see some fine fellow, 
dressed and curled to his satisfaction, parading in the 
sun. An accident of wealth or birth has marked him 
from the crowd. He has decked his outer walls in 
gaudy color, but is bare within. He is a cypher, but 
golden circumstance, like a figure in the million 
column, gives him substance. Yet the void cries out 
on all matters in dispute with firm conviction. 

But this cypher need not dress in purple. He is 
shabby, let us say, and pinched with poverty. Whose 
fault? Who knows? But does misfortune in itself 
give wisdom? He is poor. Therefore he decides that 
the world is sick with pestilence, and accordingly he 
proclaims himself a doctor. Or perhaps he sits at 
ease in middle circumstance. He judges that his is an 
open mind because he lets a harsh opinion blow upon 
his ignorance until it flames with hatred. He sets up 
to be a thinker, and he is resolved to shatter the foun- 
dations of a thousand years. 

The outer darkness stretches to such a giddy dis- 
tance ! And these thousand candles of belief, flicker- 
ing in the night, are so insufiicient even in their aggre- 



88 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

gate! Shall a candle wink at flaming Jupiter as an 
equal? By what persuasion is one's own tiny wick, 
shielded in the fingers from misadventure, the greatest 
light? 

Who is there who has read more than a single chap- 
ter in the book of hfe? Most of us have faltered 
through scarcely a dozen paragraphs, yet we scribble 
our sure opinion in the margin. We hear a trifling 
pebble fall in a muddy pool, and we think that we have 
listened to the pounding of the sea. We hold up our 
little candle and we consider that its light dispels the 
general night. 

But it has happened once in a while that someone 
really strikes a larger light and offers it to many 
travelers for their safety. He holds his candle above 
his head for the general comfort. And to it there rush 
the multitude of those whose candles have been gutted. 
They relight their wicks, and go their way with a song 
and cry, to announce their brotherhood. If they see a 
stranger off the path, they call to him to join their 
band. And they draw him from the mire. 

And sometimes this company respects the other 
candles that survive the wind. They confess with 
good temper that their glare, also, is sufficient; that 
there is, indeed, more than one path across the ni^t. 
But sometimes in their intensity — in their sureness of 
exclusive salvation — they fall to bickering. One band 
of converts elbows another. There is a mutual lifting 
of the nose in scorn, an amused contempt, or they come 
to blows and all candles are extinguished. And some- 



LITTLE CANDLES 89 

times, with candles out, they travel onward, still telling 
one another of their band how the darkness flees 
before them. 

We live in a world of storm, of hatred, of blind con- 
ceit, of shrill and intolerant opinion. The past is 
worshiped. The past is scorned. Some wish only to 
kiss the great toe of old convention. Others shout that 
we must run bandaged in the dark, if we would prove 
our faith in God and man. It is the best of times, and 
the worst of times. It is the dawn. We grope toward 
midnight. Our fathers were saints in judgment. Our 
fathers were fools and rogues. Let's hold minutely to 
the past! Any change is sacrilege. Let's rip it up! 
Let's destroy it altogether! 

We'U kill him and stamp on him: He's a Montague. 
We'll draw and quarter him: He's a Capulet. He's 
a radical: He must be hanged. A conservative: His 
head shall decorate our pike. 

A plague on both your houses ! 

Panaceas are hawked among us, each with a magic 
to cure our ills. Universal suffrage is a leap to per- 
fection. Tax reform will bring the golden age. With 
capital and interest smashed, we shall live in heaven. 
The soviet, the recall from office, the six-hour day, the 
demands of labor, mark the better path. The greater 
clamor of the crowd is the guide to wisdom. Men with 
black beards and ladies with cigarettes say that 
machine-guns and fire and death are pills that are 
potent for our good. We live in a welter of quarrel 
and disagreement. One pictures a mighty shelf with 



90 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

bottles, and doctors running to and fro. The poor 
world is on its back, opening its mouth to every spoon. 
By the hubbub in the pantry — the yells and scuffling 
at the sink — we know that drastic and contrary cures 
are striving for the mastery. 

There was a time when beacons burned on the hills 
to be our guidance. The flames were fed and moulded 
by the experience of the centuries. Men might differ 
on the path — might even scramble up a dozen different 
slopes — but the hill-top was beyond dispute. 

But now the great fires smoulder. The Constitu- 
tion, it is said, — pecked at since the first, — ^must now 
be carted off and sold as junk. Art has torn down 
its older standards. The colors of Titian are in the 
dust. Poets no longer bend the knee to Shakespeare. 

Conceit is a pilot who scorns the harbor lights — 

Modesty was once a virtue. Patience, diligence, 
thrift, humility, charity — who pays now a tribute to 
them? Charity is only a sop, it seems, that is thrown 
in fright to the swift wolves of revolution. Humil- 
ity is now a weakness. Diligence is despised. Thrift 
is the advice of cowards. Who now cares for the 
lessons that experience and tested fact once taught? 
Ignorance sits now in the highest seat and gives its 
orders, and the clamor of the crowd is its high 
authority. 

And what has become of modesty? A maid once 
was prodigal if she unmasked her beauty to the moon. 
Morality? Let's all laugh together. It's a quaint old 
word. 



LITTLE CANDLES 91 

Tolerance is the last study in the school of wisdom. 
Lord ! Lord ! Tonight let my prayer be that I may 
know that my own opinion is but a candle in the wind ! 



A Visit to a Poet. 

NOT long ago I accepted the invitation of a 
young poet to visit him at his lodging. As 
my life has fallen chiefly among merchants, 
lawyers and other practical folk, I went with much 
curiosity. 

My poet, I must confess, is not entirely famous. 
His verses have appeared in several of the less known 
papers, and a judicious printer has even offered to 
gather them into a modest sheaf. There are, however, 
certain vile details of expense that hold up the project. 
The printer, although he confesses their merit, feels 
that the poet should bear the cost. 

His verses are of the newer sort. When read aloud 
they sound pleasantly in the ear, but I sometimes miss 
the meaning. I once pronounced an intimate soul- 
study to be a jolly description of a rainy night. This 
was my stupidity. I could see a soul quite plainly 
when it was pointed out. It was like looking at the 
moon. You get what you look for — a man or a woman 
or a kind of map of Asia. In poetry of this sort I 
need a hint or two to start me right. But when my 
nose has been rubbed, so to speak, against the anise- 
bag, I am a very hound upon the scent. 

The street where my friend lives is just north of 
Greenwich Village, and it still shows a remnant of 
more aristocratic days. Behind its shabby fronts are 



A VISIT TO A POET 93 

long drawing-rooms with tarnished glass chandeliers 
and frescoed ceilings and gaunt windows with inside 
blinds. Plaster cornices still gather the dust of years. 
There are heavy stairways with black walnut rails. 
Marble Lincolns still liberate the slaves in niches of 
the hallway. Bronze Ladies of the Lake await their 
tardy lovers. Diana runs with her hunting dogs upon 
the newel post. In these houses lived the heroines of 
sixty years ago, who shopped for crinohne and spent 
their mornings at Stewart's to match a Godey pattern. 
They drove of an afternoon with gay silk parasols to 
the Crystal Palace on Forty-second Street. In short, 
they were our despised Victorians. With our advance- 
ment we have made the world so much better since. 

I pressed an electric button. Then, as the door 
clicked, I sprang against it. These patent catches 
throw me into a momentary panic. I feel Hke one of 
the foolish virgins with untrimmed lamp, just about to 
be caught outside — but perhaps I confuse the legend. 
Inside, there was a bare hallway, with a series of stair- 
ways rising in the gloom — round and round, hke the 
frightful staircase of the Opium Eater. At the top 
of the stairs a black disk hung over the rail — probably 
a head. 

"HeUo," I said. 

"Oh, it's you. Come up!" And the poet came 
down to meet me, with slippers slapping at the heels. 

There was a villainous smell on the stairs. "Some- 
thing burning?" I asked. 



94 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

At first the poet didn't smell it. "Oh, that smell!" 
he said at last. "That's the embalmer." 

"The embalmer?" 

We were opposite a heavy door on the second floor. 
He pointed his thumb at it. "There's an embalmer's 
school inside." 

"Dear me!" I said. "Has he any — anything to 
practice on?" 

The poet pushed the door open a crack. It was very 
dark inside. It smelled like Ptolemy in his later days. 
Or perhaps I detected Polonius, found at last beneath 
the stairs. 

"Bless me!" I asked, "What does he teach in his 
school?" 

"Embalming, and all that sort of thing." 

"It never occurred to me," I confessed, "that under- 
takers had to learn. I thought it came naturally. 
Ducks to water, you know. They look as if they could 
pick up a thing like embalming by instinct. I don't 
suppose you knew old Mr. Smith." 

"No." 

"He wore a white carnation on business after- 
noons." 

We rounded a turn of the black walnut stair. 

"There!" exclaimed the poet. "That is the office of 
the Shriek/' 

1 know the Shriek. It is one of the periodicals of 
the newer art that does not descend to the popular 
taste. It will not compromise its ideals. It prints 
pictures of men and women with hideous, distorted 



A VISIT TO A POET 95 

bodies. It is solving sex. Once in a while the police 
know what it is talking about, and then they rather 
stupidly keep it out of the mails for a month or so. 

Now I had intended for some time to subscribe to 
the Shriek, because I wished to see my friend's verses 
as they appeared. In this way I could learn what the 
newer art was doing, and could brush oiit of my head 
the cobwebs of convention. Keats and Shelley have 
been thrown into the discard. We have come a long 
journey from the older poets. 

"I would like to subscribe," I said. 

The poet, of course, was pleased. He rapped at a 
door marked "Editor." 

A young woman's head in a mob-cap came into 
view. She wore a green and purple smock, and a 
cigarette hung loosely from her mouth. She looked 
at me at first as if I were an old-fashioned poem or a 
bundle of modest drawings, but cheered when I told 
my errand. There was a cup of steaming soup on an 
alcohol burner, and half a loaf of bread. On a string 
across the window handkerchiefs and stockings were 
hung to dry. A desk was littered with papers. 

I paid my money and was enrolled. I was given a 
current number of the Shriek, and was told not to miss 
a poem by Sillivitch. 

"Sillivitch?" I asked. 

"Sillivitch," the lady answered. "Our greatest poet 
— maybe the greatest of all time. Writes only for the 
Shriek, Wonderful! Realistic!" 



HINTS TO PILGRIMS 



"Snug little office," I said to the poet, when we were 
on the stairs. "She lives in there, too?" 

"Oh, yes," he said. "Smart girl, that. Never com- 
promises. Wants reality and all that sort of thing. 
You must read Sillivitch. Amazing! Doesn't seem 
to mean anything at first. But then you get it in a 
flash." 

We had now come to the top of the building. 

"There isn't much smell up here," I said. 

"You don't mind the smell. You come to like it," 
he replied. "It's bracing." 

At the top of the stairs, a hallway led to rooms both 
front and back. The ceiling of these rooms, low even 
in the middle, sloped to windows of half height in 
dormers. The poet waved his hand. "I have been 
living in the front room," he said, "but I am adding 
this room behind for a study." 

We entered the study. A man was mopping up the 
floor. Evidently the room had not been lived in for 
years, for the dirt was caked to a half inch. A general 
wreckage of furniture — a chair, a table with marble 
top, a carved sideboard with walnut dingles, a wooden 
bed with massive headboard, a mattress and a broken 
pitcher — had been swept to the middle of the room. 
There was also a pile of old embalmer's journals, and 
a great carton that seemed to contain tubes of tooth- 
paste. 

"You see," said the poet, "I have been living in the 
other room. This used to be a storage — ^years ago. 



A VISIT TO A POET 97 

for the family that once lived here, and more recently 
for the embalmer." 

"Storage!" I exclaimed. "You don't suppose that 
they kept any — ?" 

"No." 

"Well," I said, "it's a snug little place." 

I bent over and picked up one of the embalmer's 
journals. On the cover there was a picture of a little 
boy in a night-gown, saying his prayer to his mother. 
The prayer was printed underneath. "And, mama," 
it read, "have God make me a good boy, and when I 
grow up let me help papa in his business, and never 
use anything but Twirpp's Old Reliable Embalming 
Fluid, the kind that papa has always used, and 
grandpa before him." 

Now, Charles Lamb, I recall, once confessed that 
he was moved to enthusiasm by an undertaker's adver- 
tisement. "Methinks," he writes, "I could be willing 
to die, in death to be so attended. The two rows all 
round close-drove best black japanned nails, — how 
feelingly do they invite, and almost irresistibly per- 
suade us to come and be fastened down." But the 
journal did not stir me to this high emotion. 

I crossed the room and stooped to look out of the 
dormer window — into a shallow yard where an aban- 
doned tin bath-tub and other unprized valuables were 
kept. A shabby tree acknowledged that it had lost 
its way, but didn't know what to do about it. It had 
its elbow on the fence and seemed to be in thought. 
A wash-stand lay on its side, as if it snapped its fingers 



98 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

forever at soap and towels. Beyond was a tall build- 
ing, with long tables and rows of girls working. 

One of the girls desisted for a moment from her 
feathers with which she was making hats, and stuck 
out her tongue at me in a coquettish way. I returned 
her salute. She laughed and tossed her head and went 
back to her feathers. 

The young man who had been mopping up the floor 
went out for fresh water. 

"Who is that feUow?" I asked. 

"He works downstairs." 

"For the Shriekr 

"For the embalmer. He's an apprentice." 

"I would like to meet him." 

Presently I did meet him. 

"What have you there?" I asked. He was folding 
up a great canvas bag of curious pattern. 

"It's when you are shipped away — ^to Texas or 
somewhere. This is a little one. You'd need^ — " he 
appraised me from head to foot — "you'd need a num- 
ber ten." 

He desisted from detail. He shifted to the story of 
his life. Since he had been a child he had wished to 
be an undertaker. 

Now I had myself once known an undertaker, and 
I had known his son. The son went to Munich to 
study for Grand Opera. I crossed on the steamer 
with him. He sang in the ship's concert, "Oh, That 
We Two Were Maying." It was pitched for high 
tenor, so he sang it an octave low, and was quite 



A VISIT TO A POET 99 

gloomy about it. In the last verse he expressed a 
desire to lie at rest beneath the churchyard sod. The 
boat was rolling and I went out to get the air. And 
then I did not see him for several years. We met at 
a funeral. He wore a long black coat and a white 
carnation. He smiled at me with a gentle, mournful 
smile and waved me to a seat. He was Tristan no 
longer. Valhalla no more echoed to his voice. He 
had succeeded to his father's business. 

Here the poet interposed. "The Countess came to 
see me yesterday." 

"Mercy," I said, "what countess?" 

"Oh, don't you know her work? She's a poet and 
she writes for the people downstairs. She's the 
Countess Sillivitch." 

"Sillivitch!" I answered, "of course I know her. 
She is the greatest poet, maybe, of all time." 

"No doubt about it," said the poet excitedly, "and 
there's a poem of hers in this number. She writes in 
italics when she wants you to yell it. And when she 
puts it in capitals, my God! you could hear her to the 
elevated. It's ripping stuff." 

"Dear me," I said, "I should like to read it. 
Awfully. It must be funny." 

"It isn't funny at all," the poet answered. "It isn't 
meant to be funny. Did you read her 'Burning 
Kiss'?" 

"I'm sorry," I answered. 

The poet sighed. "It's wonderfully realistic. 



100 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

There's nothing old-fashioned about that poem. The 
Countess wears painted stockings." 

"Bless me!" I cried. 

"Stalks with flowers. She comes from Bulgaria, 
or Esthonia, or somewhere. Has a husband in a 
castle. Incompatible. He stifles her. Common. In 
business. Beer spigots. She is artistic. Wants to 
soar. And tragic. You remember my study of a 
soul?" 

"The rainy night? Yes, I remember." 

"Well, she's the one. She sat on the floor and told 
me her troubles." 

"You don't suppose that I could meet her, do you?" 
I asked. 

The poet looked at me with withering scorn. "You 
wouldn't like her," he said. "She's very modern. She 
says very startling things. You have to be in the 
modern spirit to follow her. And sympathetic. She 
doesn't want any marriage or government or things 
like that. Just truth and freedom. It's convention 
that clips our wings." 

"Conventions are stupid things," I agreed. 

"And the past isn't any good, either," the poet said. 
"The past is a chain upon us. It keeps us off the 
mountains." 

"Exactly," I assented. 

"That's what the Countess thinks. We must, de- 
stroy the past. Everything. Customs. Art. Gov- 
ernment. We must be ready for the coming of the 
dawn." 



A VISIT TO A POET 101 

"Naturally," I said. "Candles trimmed, and all 
that sort of thing. You don't suppose that I could 
meet the Countess? Well, I'm sorry. What's the bit 
of red paper on the wall? Is it over a dirty spot?" 

"It's to stir up my ideas. It's gay and when I look 
at it I think of something." 

"And then I suppose that you look out of that win- 
dow, against that brick wall and those windows 
opposite, and write poems — a sonnet to the girl who 
stuck out her tongue at me." 

"Oh, yes." 

"Hot in summer up here?" 

"Yes." 

"And cold in winter?" 

"Yes." 

"And I suppose that you get some ideas out of that 
old tin bath-tub and those ash-cans." 

"Well, hardly." 

"And you look at the moon through that dirty 
skylight?'' 

"No! There's nothing in that old stuff. Every- 
body's fed up on the moon." 

"It's a snug place," I said. And I came away. 

I circled the stairs into the denser smell which, by 
this time, I found rather agreeable. The embalmer's 
door was open. In the gloom inside I saw the appren- 
tice busied in some dark employment. "I got some- 
thin' to show you," he called. 

"Tomorrow," I answered. 

As I was opening the street door, a woman came up 



102 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

the steps. She was a dark, Bulgarian sort of woman. 
Or Esthonian, perhaps. I held back the door to let 
her pass. She wore long ear-rings. Her skirt was 
looped high in scollops. She wore sandals — and 
painted stockings. 



Autumn Days. 



IT was rather a disservice when the poet wrote 
that the melancholy days were come. His folly 
is inexplicable. If he had sung through his nose 
of thaw and drizzle, all of us would have pitched in 
to help him in his dismal chorus. But October and 
November are brisk and cheerful months. 

In the spring, to be sure, there is a languid sadness. 
Its beauty is too frail. Its flowerets droop upon the 
plucking. Its warm nights, its breeze that blows 
from the fragrant hills, warn us how brief is the 
blossom time. In August the year slumbers. Its 
sleepy days nod across the heavy orchards and the 
yellow grain fields. Smoke looks out from chimneys, 
but finds no wind for comrade. For a penny it would 
stay at home and doze upon the hearth, to await a 
playmate from the north. The birds are still. Only 
the insects sing. A threshing-machine, far off, sinks 
to as drowsy a melody as theirs, like a company of 
grasshoppers, but with longer beard and deeper 
voice. The streams that frolicked to nimble tunes in 
May now crawl from pool to pool. The very shadows 
linger under cover. They crouch close beneath shed 
and tree, and scarcely stir a finger until the fiery sun 
has turned its back. 

September rubs its eyes. It hears autumn, as it 
were, pounding on its bedroom door, and turns for 



10 i HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

another wink of sleep. But October is awakened by 
the frost. It dresses itself in gaudy color. It flings 
a scarlet garment on the woods and a purple scarf 
across the hills. The wind, at last, like a merry piper, 
cries out the tune, and its brisk and sunny days come 
dancing from the north. 

Yesterday was a holiday and I went walking in the 
woods. Although it is still September it grows late, 
and there is already a touch of October in the air. 
After a week of sultry weather — a tardy remnant 
from last month — a breeze yesterday sprang out of 
the northwest. Like a good housewife it swept the 
dusty corners of the world. It cleared our path 
across the heavens and raked down the hot cobwebs 
from the sky. Clouds had yawned in idleness. They 
had sat on the dull circle of the earth like fat old men 
with drooping chins, but yesterday they stirred them- 
selves. The wind whipped them to their feet. It pur- 
sued them and plucked at their frightened skirts. It 
is thus, after the sleepy season, that the wind practices 
for the rough and tumble of November. It needs but 
to quicken the tempo into sixteenth notes, to rouse a 
wholesome tempest. 

Who could be melancholy in so brisk a month ? The 
poet should hang his head for shame at uttering such 
a libel. These dazzling days could hale him into court. 
The jury, with one voice, without rising from its box, 
would hold for a heavy fine. Apples have been 
gathered in. There is a thirsty, tipsy smell from the 
cider presses. Hay is pitched up to the very roof. 



AUTUMN DAYS 105 



Bursting granaries show their golden produce at the 
cracks. The yellow stubble of the fields is a promise 
that is kept. And who shall say that there is any 
sadness in the fallen leaves? They are a gay and 
sounding carpet. Who dances here needs no bell 
upon his ankle, and no fiddle for the tune. 

And sometimes in October the air is hazy and spiced 
with smells. Nature, it seems, has cooked a feast in 
the heat of summer, and now its viands stand out to 
cool. 

November lights its fires and brings in early 
candles. This is the season when chimneys must be 
tightened for the tempest. Their mighty throats roar 
that all is strong aloft. Dogs now leave a stranger to 
go his way in peace, and they bark at the windy moon. 
Windows rattle, but not with sadness. They jest and 
chatter with the blast. They gossip of storms on 
barren mountains. 

Night, for so many months, has been a timid crea- 
ture. It has hid so long in gloomy cellars while the 
regal sun strutted on his way. But now night and 
darkness put their heads together for his overthrow. 
In shadowy garrets they mutter their discontent and 
plan rebellion. They snatch the fields by four o'clock. 
By five they have restored their kingdom. They set 
the stars as guardsmen of their rule. 

Now travelers are pelted into shelter. Signboards 
creak. The wind whistles for its rowdy company. 
Night, the monarch, rides upon the storm. 

A match! We'll light the logs. We'll crack nuts 



106 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

and pass the cider. How now, master poet, is there no 
thirsty passage in your throat ? I offer you a bowl of 
milk and popcorn. Must you brood tonight upon the 
barren fields — the meadows brown and sear? Who 
cares now how the wind grapples with the chimneys? 
Here is snug company, warm and safe. Here are 
syrup and griddle-cakes. Do you still suck your mel- 
ancholy pen when such a feast is going forward? 



On Finding a Plot. 

A YOUNG author has confessed to me that 
lately, in despair at hitting on a plot, he 
. locked himself in his room after breakfast 
with an oath that he would not leave it until something 
was contrived and under way. He did put an apple 
and sandwich prudently at the back of his desk, but 
these, he swore, like the locusts and wild honey in the 
wilderness, should last him through his struggle. By 
a happy afterthought he took with him into retire- 
ment a volume of De Maupassant. Perhaps, he con- 
sidered, if his own invention lagged and the hour grew 
late, he might shift its characters into new positions. 
Rather than starve till dawn he could dress a courte- 
zan in honest cloth, or tease a happy wife from her 
household in the text to a mad elopement. Or by 
jiggling all the plots together, like the bits of glass in 
a kaleidoscope, the pieces might fall into strange and 
startling patterns. 

This is not altogether a new thought with him. 
While sucking at his pen in a former drouth he con- 
sidered whether a novel might not be made by com- 
bining the characters of one story with the circum- 
stance of another. Let us suppose, for example, that 
Carmen, before she got into that ugly affair with the 
Toreador, had settled down in Barchester beneath the 
towers. Would the shadow of the cloister, do you 



108 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

think, have cooled her southern blood? Would she 
have conformed to the decent gossip of the town? Or, 
on the contrary, does not a hot color always tint the 
colder mixture? Suppose that Carmen came to live 
just outside the Cathedral close and walked every 
morning with her gay parasol and her pretty swishing 
skirts past the Bishop's window. 

We can fancy his pen hanging dully above his ser- 
mon, with his eyes on space for any wandering 
thought, as if the clouds, like treasure ships upon a 
sea, were freighted with riches for his use. The 
Bishop is brooding on an address to the Ladies' Sew- 
ing Guild. He must find a text for his instructive 
finger. It is a warm spring morning and the daffodils 
are waving in the borders of the grass. A robin sings 
in the hedge with an answer from his mate. There is 
wind in the tree-tops with lively invitation to adven- 
ture, but the Bishop is bent to his sober task. Carmen 
picks her way demurely across the puddles in the 
direction of the Vicarage. Her eyes turn modestly 
toward his window. Surely she does not see him at 
his desk. That dainty inch of scarlet stocking is quite 
by accident. It is the puddles and the wind frisking 
with her skirt. 

"Eh ! Dear me !" The good man is merely human. 
He pushes up his spectacles for nearer sight. He 
draws aside the curtain. "Dear me! Bless my soul! 
Who is the lady? Quite a foreign air. I don't re- 
member her at our little gatherings for the heathen." 
A text is forgotten. The clouds are empty caravels. 



ON FINDING A PLOT 109 

He calls to Betsy, the housemaid, for a fresh neck- 
cloth and his gaiters. He has recalled a meeting with 
the Vicar and goes out whisthng softly, to disaster. 

Alas! In my forgetfulness I have skimmed upon 
the actual plot. You have recalled already how La 
Signora Madeline descended on the Bishop's Palace. 
Her beauty was a hard assault. Except for her 
crippled state she might herself have toppled the 
Bishop over. But she pales beside the dangerous 
Carmen. 

Suppose, for a better example, that the cheerful 
Mark Tapley who always came out strong in adver- 
sity, were placed in a modern Russian novel. As the 
undaunted Taplovitch he would have shifted its gloom 
to a sunny ending. Fancy our own dear PoUyanna, 
the glad girl, adopted by an aunt in "Crime and Pun- 
ishment." Even Dostoyevsky must have laid down 
his doleful pen to give her at last a happy wedding — 
flower-girls and angel- food, even a shrill soprano 
behind the hired palms and a table of cut glass. 

Oliver Twist and Nancy, — ^merely acquaintances 
in the original story, — with a fresh hand at the plot, 
might have gone on a bank holiday to Margate. And 
been blown off shore. Suppose that the whole excur- 
sion was wrecked on Treasure Island and that every- 
one was drowned except Nancy, Oliver and perhaps 
the trombone player of the ship's band, who had blown 
himself so full of wind for fox-trots on the upper deck 
that he couldn't sink. It is Robinson Crusoe, lodging 
as a handsome bachelor on the lonely island, — observe 



110 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

the cunning of the plot ! — who battles with the waves 
and rescues Nancy. The movie-rights alone of this 
are worth a fortune. And then Crusoe, Oliver, Fri- 
day and the trombone player stand a siege from John 
Silver and Bill Sikes, who are pirates, with Spanish 
doubloons in a hidden cove. And Crusoe falls in love 
with Nancy. Here is a tense triangle. But youth 
goes to youth. Crusoe's whiskers are only dyed their 
glossy black. The trombone player, by good luck 
(you see now why he was saved from the wreck), is 
discovered to be a retired clergyman — doubtless a 
Methodist. The happy knot is tied. And then — a 
sail ! A sail ! Oliver and Nancy settle down in a semi- 
detached near London, with oyster shells along the 
garden path and cat-tails in the umbrella jar. The 
story ends prettily under their plane-tree at the rear — 
tea for three, with a trombone solo, and the faithful 
Friday and Old Bill, reformed now, as gardener, 
clipping together the shrubs against the sunny wall. 

Was there a serpent in the garden at peaceful Cran- 
ford? Suppose that one of the gay rascals of Dumas, 
with tall boots and black moustachios, had got in when 
the tempting moon was up. Could the gentle ladies 
in their fragile guard of crinoline have withstood this 
French assault? 

Or Camille, perhaps, before she took her cough, 
settled at Bath and entangled Mr. Pickwick in the 
Pump Room. Do not a great hat and feather find 
their victim anywhere? Is not a silken ankle as potent 
at Bath as in Bohemia? Surely a touch of age and 



ON FINDING A PLOT 111 

gout is no prevention against the general plague. Nor 
does a bald head tower above the softer passions. 
Camille's pretty nose is powdered for the onslaught. 
She has arranged her laces in dangerous hazard to the 
eye. And now the bold huzzy undeniably winks at 
Mr. Pickwick over her pint of "killibeate." She drops 
her fan with usual consequence. A nod. A smile. 
A word. At the Assembly— mark her sudden prog- 
ress and the triumphant end! — they sit together in 
the shadows of the balcony. "My dear," says Mr. 
Pickwick, gazing tenderly through his glasses, "my 
love, my own, will you — bless my soul! — ^will you 
share my lodgings at Mrs. Bardell's in Goswell 
Street?" We are mariners, all of us, coasting in dan- 
gerous waters. It is the syren's voice, her white 
beauty gleaming on the shoal — it is the moon that 
throws us on the rocks. 

And then a dozen dowagers breed the gossip. 
Duchesses, frail with years, pop and burst with the 
pleasant secret. There is even greater commotion 
than at Mr. Pickwick's other disturbing affair with 
the middle-aged lady in the yellow curl-papers. This 
previous affair you may recall. He had left his watch 
by an oversight in the taproom, and he went down to 
get it when the inn was dark. On the return he took a 
false direction at the landing and, being misled by the 
row of boots along the hall, he entered the wrong 
room. He was in his nightcap in bed when, peeping 
through the curtains, he saw the aforesaid lady brush- 
ing her back hair. A duel was narrowly averted when 



11^ HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

this startling scandal came to the ears of the lady's 
lover, Mr. Peter Magnus. Camille, I think, could 
have kept this sharper scandal to herself. At most, 
with a prudent finger on her lips, she would have 
whispered the intrigue harmlessly behind her fan and 
set herself to snare a duke. 

I like to think, also, of the incongruity of throwing 
Rollo (RoUo the perfect, the Bayard of the nursery, 
the example of our suffering childhood) — Rollo 
grown up, of course, and without his aseptic Uncle 
George — into the gay scandal, let us say, of the 
Queen's Necklace. Perhaps it is forgotten how he and 
his little sister Jane went to the Bull Fight in Rome 
on Sunday morning by mistake. They were looking 
for the Presbyterian Church, and hand in hand they 
followed the crowd. It is needless to remind you how 
Uncle George was vexed. Rollo was a prig. He 
loved his Sunday school and his hour of piano practice. 
He brushed his hair and washed his face without com- 
pulsion. He even got in behind his ears. He went 
to bed cheerfully upon a hint. Thirty years ago — I 
was so pestered — if I could have met Rollo in the 
flesh I would have lured him to the alleyway behind 
our barn and pushed him into the manure-pit. In the 
crisp vernacular of our street, I would have punched 
the everlasting tar out of him. 

It was circumstance that held the Bishop and Rollo 
down. Isn't Cinderella just a common story of sordid 
realism until the fairy godmother appears? Except 
for the pumpkin and a very small foot she would have 



ON FINDING A PLOT 113 

married the butcher's boy, and been snubbed by her 
sisters to the end. It was only luck that it was a 
priiice who awakened the Sleeping Beauty. The 
plumber's assistant might have stumbled by. What 
was Aladdin without his uncle, the magician? Do 
princesses still sleep exposed to a golden kiss? Are 
there lamps for rubbing, discarded now in attics ? 

Sinbad, with a steady wife, would have stayed at 
home and become an alderman. Romeo might have 
married a Montague and lived happily ever after. It 
was but chance that Titania awakened in the Ass's 
company — chance that Viola was cast on the coast of 
lUyria and found her lover. Any of these plots could 
have been altered by jogging the author's elbow. A 
bit of indigestion wrecks the crimson shallop. 
Comedy or tragedy is but the falling of the dice. By 
the flip of a coin comes the poisoned goblet or the 
princess. 

But my young author's experiment with De 
Maupassant was not successful. He tells me that 
hunger caught him in the middle of the afternoon, and 
that he went forth for a cup of malted milk, which is 
his weakness. His head was as empty as his stomach. 

And yet there are many novels written and even 
published, and most of them seem to have what pass 
for plots. Bipeds, undeniably, are set up with some 
likeness to humanity. They talk from page to page 
without any squeak of bellows. They live in lodgings 
and make acquaintance across the air-shaft. They 
wrestle with villains. They fall in love. They starve 



m, HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

and then grow famous. And at last, in all good books, 
journeys end in lovers' meeting. It is as easy as lying. 
Only a plot is needed. 

And may not anyone set up the puppets? Rich 
man, poor man, beggarman, thief ! You have only to 
say eenie meenie down the list, and trot out a brunette 
or a blonde. There is broadcloth in the tiring-box, 
and swords and velvet; and there is, also, patched 
wool, and shiny elbows. Your lady may sigh her soul 
to the Grecian tents, or watch for honest Tom on his 
motor-cycle. On Venetian balcony and village stoop 
the stars show alike for lovers and everywhere there 
are friendly shadows in the night. 

Like a master of marionettes, we may pull the 
puppets by their strings. It is such an easy matter — 
if once a plot is given — ^to lift a beggar or to overthrow 
a rascal. A virtuous puppet can be hoisted to a tinsel 
castle. A twitching of the thumb upsets the wicked 
King. RoUo is pitched to his knees before a scheming 
beauty. And would it not be fun to dangle before .the 
Bishop that little Carmen figure with her daring lace 
and scarlet stockings? — or to swing the bold Camille 
by the strings into Mr. Pickwick's arms as the curtain 
falls? 

Was it not Hawthorne who died leaving a note- 
book full of plots? And Walter Scott, when that 
loyal, harassed hand of his was shriveled into death, 
must have had by him a hundred hints for projected 
books. One author — I forget who he was — be- 
queathed to another author — the name has escaped 



ON FINDING A PLOT 115 

me — a memorandum of characters and events. At 
any author's death there must be a precious sal- 
vage. Among the surviving papers there sits at least 
one dusty heroine waiting for a lover. Here are notes 
for the Duchess's elopement. Here is a sketch how 
the deacon proved to be a villain. As old ladies put 
by scraps of silk for a crazy quilt, shall not an author, 
also, treasure in his desk shreds of character and odds 
and ends to make a plot? 

Now the truth is, I suspect, that the actual plot has 
little to do with the merits of a great many of the best 
books. It is only the bucket that fetches up the water 
from the well. It is the string that holds the shining 
beads. Who really cares whether Tom Jones married 
Sophia? And what does it matter whether Falstaff 
died in bed or in his boots, or whether Uncle Toby 
married the widow? It is the mirth and casual ad- 
venture by the way that hold our interest. 

Some of the best authors, indeed, have not given a 
thought to their plots until it is time to wind up the 
volume. When Dickens sent the Pickwick Club upon 
its travels, certainly he was not concerned whether 
Tracy Tupman found a wife. He had not given a 
thought to Sam's romance with the pretty housemaid 
at Mr. Nupkins's. The elder Mrs. Weller's fatal 
cough was clearly a happy afterthought. Thackeray, 
at the start, could hardly have foreseen Esmond's 
marriage. When he wrote the early chapters of 
"Vanity Fair," he had not traced Becky to her shabby 
garret of the Elephant at Pumpernickel. Dumas, I 



116 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

have no doubt, wrote from page to page, careless of 
the end. Doubtless he marked Milady for a bad end, 
but was unconcerned whether it would be a cough or 
noose. Victor Hugo did no more than follow a trail 
across the mountains of his invention, content with the 
kingdoms of each new turning. 

In these older and more deliberate books, if a young 
lady smiled upon the hero, it was not already schemed 
whether they would be lovers, with the very manner 
of his proposal already set. The glittering moon was 
not yet bespoken for the night. "My dear young 
lady," this older author thinks, "you have certainly 
very pretty eyes and I like the way that lock of brown 
hair rests against your ear, but I am not at all sure 
that I shall let you marry my hero. Please sit around 
for a dozen chapters while I observe you. I must see 
you in tweed as well as silk. Perhaps you have an 
ugly habit of whining. Or safe in a married state you 
might wear a mob-cap in to breakfast. I'll send my 
hero up to London for his fling. There is an actress 
I must have him meet. I'll let him frolic through the 
winter. On his return he may choose between you." 

"My dear madam," another of these older authors 
meditates, "how can I judge you on a first acquaint- 
ance? Certainly you talk loosely for an honest wife. 
It is too soon, as yet, to know how far your flirtation 
leads. I must observe you with Mr. Fopling in the 
garden after dinner. If, later, I grow dull and my 
readers nod, your elopement will come handy." 

Nor was a lady novelist of the older school less de- 



ON FINDING A PLOT 117 

liberate. When a bold adventurer appears, she holds 
her heroine to the rearward of her affection. "I'll 
make no decision yet for Lady Emily," she thinks. 
"This gay fellow may have a wife somewhere. His 
smooth manner with the ladies comes with practice. 
It is soon enough if I decide upon their affair in my 
second volume. Perhaps, after all, the captain may 
prove to be the better man." 

And yet this spacious method requires an ample 
genius. A smaller writer must take a map and put his 
finger beforehand on his destination. When a hero 
fares forth singing in the dawn, the author must know 
at once his snug tavern for the night. The hazard of 
the morning has been matched already with a peaceful 
twilight. The seeds of time are planted, the very 
harvest counted when the furrow's made. My heart 
goes out to that young author who sits locked in his 
study, munching his barren apple. He must perfect 
his scenario before he starts. How easy would be his 
task, if only he could just begin, "Once upon a time," 
and follow his careless contrivance. 

I know a teacher who has a full-length novel un- 
published and concealed. Sometimes, I fancy, at mid- 
night, when his Latin themes are marked, he draws 
forth its precious pages. He alters and smooths his 
sentences while the household sleeps. And even in 
his classroom, as he listens to the droning of a con- 
jugation, he leaps to horse. Little do his students 
suspect, as they stutter with their verbs, that with 



118 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

their teacher, heedless of convention, rides the dark 
lady of his swift adventure. 

I look with great awe on an acquaintance who 
averages more than one story a week and publishes 
them in a periodical called Frisky Stories. He shifts 
for variety among as many as five or six pen-names. 
And I marvel at a friend who once wrote a story a day 
for a newspaper syndicate. But his case was pathetic. 
When I saw him last, he was sitting on a log in the 
north forest, gloomily estimating how many of his 
wretched stories would cover the wood-pulp of the 
state. His health was threatened. He was resting 
from the toil 

"Of dropping buckets into empty wells, 
And growing old in drawing nothing up." 

From all this it must appear that the real difficulty 
is in finding a sufficient plot. The start of a plot is 
easy, but it is hard to carry it on and end it. I myself, 
on any vacant morning, could get a hero tied hand and 
foot inside a cab, but then I would not know where 
to drive him. I have thought, in an enthusiastic 
moment, that he might be lowered down a manhole 
through the bottom of the cab. This is an unprece- 
dented villainy, and I have gone so far as to select a 
lonely manhole in Gramercy Park around the corner 
from the Players' Club. But I am lost how my hero 
could be rescued. Covered with muck, I could hardly 
hope that his lady would go running to his arms. I 



ON FINDING A PLOT 119 

have, also, a pretty pencil for a fight in the ancient 
style, with swords upon a stairway. But what then? 
And what shall I do with the gallant Percival de 
Vere, after he has slid' down the rope from his beetling 
dungeon tower? As for ladies^ — I could dress up the 
pretty creatures, but would they move or speak upon 
my bidding? No one would more gladly throw a lady 
and gentleman on a desert island. At a pinch I flatter 
myself I could draw a roaring lion. But in what cir- 
cumstance should the hungry cannibals appear? 
These questions must tax a novelist heavily. 

Or might I not, for copy, strip the front from that 
building opposite? 

"The whole of the frontage shaven sheer, 
The inside gaped : exposed to day. 
Right and wrong and common and queer. 
Bare, as the palm of your hand, it lay." 

Every room contains a story. That chair, the stove, 
the very tub for washing holds its secrets. The stairs 
echo with the tread of a dozen lives. And in every 
crowd upon the street I could cast a stone and find a 
hero. There is a seamstress somewhere, a locksmith, 
a fellow with a shovel. I need but the genius to pluck 
out the heart of their mystery. The rumble of the 
subway is the friction of lives that rub together. The 
very roar of cities is the meshing of our human gear. 
I dream of this world I might create. In romantic 
mood, a castle lifts its towers into the blue dome of 



1^0 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

heaven. I issue in spirit with Jeanne d'Arc from the 
gate of Orleans, and I play the tragedy with changing 
scene until the fires of Rouen have fallen into ashes. 
I sail the seas with Raleigh. I scheme with the hump- 
backed Richard. Out of the north, with wind and 
sunlight, my hero comes singing to his adventures. 

It would be glorious fun to create a world, to paint 
a valley in autumn colors and set up a village at the 
crossroads. Housewives chatter at their wash-lines. 
Wheels rattle on the wooden bridge. Old men doze 
on the grocery bench. And now let's throw the plot, 
at a hazard, around the lovely Susan, the grocer's 
clerk. For her lover we select a young garage-man, 
the jest of the village, who tinkers at. an improvement 
of a carburetor. The owner of a thousand acres on 
the hill shall be our villain — a wastrel and a gambler. 
There is a mortgage on his acres. He is pressed for 
payment. He steals the garage-man's blueprints. 
And now it is night. Susan dearly loves a movie. 
The Orpheum is eight miles off. Painted Cupids. 
Angels with trumpets. The villain. An eight- 
cylindered runabout. Susan. B-r-r-r-r! The movie. 
The runabout again. A lonely road. Just a kiss, my 
pretty girl. Help! Help! Chug! Chug! Aha! 
Foiled! The garage-man. You cur! You hound! 
Take that! And that! Susan. The garage-man. 
The blueprints. Name the happy day. Oh, joy! Oh, 
bliss ! 

It would be fun to model these little worlds and 
set them up to cool. 



ON FINDING A PLOT 121 

Is it any wonder that there are a million stars 
across the night? God Himself enjoyed the vast 
creation of His worlds. It was the evening and the 
morning of the sixth day when He set his puppets 
moving in their stupendous comedy. 




Circus Days. 



THERE have been warm winds out of the south 
for several days, soft rains have teased the 
daffodils into blossom along the fences, and 
this morning I heard the first clicking of a lawn- 
mower. It seems but yesterday that winter was 
tugging at the chimneys, that March freshets were 
brawling in the gutters; but, with the shifting of the 
cock upon the steeple, the spring comes from its hiding 
in the hills. At this moment, to prove the changing 
of the season, a street organ plays beneath my window. 
It is a rather miserable box and is stocked with senti- 
mental tunes for coaxing nickels out of pity. Its in- 
laid mahogany is soiled with travel. It has a peg-leg 
and it hangs around the musician's neck as if weary 
of the road. "Master," it seems to say, "may we sit 
awhile? My old stump is wearing off." And yet on 



CIRCUS DAYS 123 



this warm morning in the sunlight there is almost a 
touch of frolic in the box. A syncopation attempts a 
happier temper. It has sniffed the fragrant air, and 
desires to put a better face upon its troubles. 

The housemaid next door hangs out the Monday's 
garments to dry, and there is a pleasant flapping of 
legs and arms as if impatient for partners in a dance. 
Must a petticoat sit unasked when the music plays? 
Surely breeches and stockings will not hold back when 
a lively skirt shall beckon. A slow waltz might even 
tempt aunty's nightgown off the line. If only a vege- 
table man would come with a cart of red pieplant and 
green lettuce and offer his gaudy wares along the 
street, then the evidence of spring would be complete. 

But there is even better evidence at hand. This 
morning I noticed that a circus poster had been pasted 
on the billboard near the school-house. Several chil- 
dren and I stopped to see the wonders that were 
promised. Then the school-bell rang and they 
dawdled off. At Stratford, also, once upon a time, 
boys with shining morning faces crept like snails to 
school. Were there circus billboards in so remote a 
day? The pundits, bleared with search, are strangely 
silent. This morning it will be a shrewd lesson that 
keeps the children's thoughts from leaping out the 
window. Two times two will hardly hold their noses 
on the desk. 

On the billboard there is the usual blonde with pink 
legs, balanced on one toe on a running horse. The 
clown holds the paper hoop. The band is blowing 



IH HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

itself very red in the face. An acrobat leaps headlong 
from a high trapeze. There are five rings, thirty- 
clowns, an amazing variety of equestrian and slack- 
wire genius, a galaxy of dazzling beauties ; and every 
performance includes a dizzy, death- defying dive by 
a dauntless dare-devil — on a bicycle from the top of 
the tent. And of course there are elephants and per- 
forming dogs and fat ladies. One day only — ^two 
performances— rain or shine. 

Does not this kind of billboard stir the blood in 
these languid days of spring? It is a tonic to the sober 
street. It is a shining dial that marks the coming of 
the summer. In the winter let barns and fences pro- 
claim the fashion of our dress and tease us with bar- 
gains for the kitchen. But in the spring, when the 
wind is from the south, fences have a better use. They 
announce the circus. What child now will not come 
upon a trot? What student can keep to his solemn 
book? There is a sleepy droning from the school- 
house. The irregular verbs — lawless rascals with a 
past — chafe in a dull routine. The clock loiters 
through the hour. 

It was by mere coincidence that last night on my 
way home I stopped at a news-stand for a daily paper, 
and saw a periodical by the name of the Paste-Brush, 
On a gay cover was the picture of another blonde — a 
sister, maybe, of the lady of the billboard. She was 
held by an ankle over a sea of upturned faces, but by 
her happy, inverted smile she seemed unconscious of 
her danger. 



CIRCUS DAYS 125 



The Paste-Brush is new to me. I bought a copy, 
folded its scandalous cover out of sight and took it 
home. It proves to be the trade journal of the circus 
and amusement-park interests. It announces a cir- 
culation of seventy thousand, which I assume is 
largely among acrobats, magicians, fat ladies, clowns, 
liniment- venders, lion-tamers, Caucasian Beauties and 
actors on obscure circuits. 

Now it happens that among a fairly wide acquaint- 
ance I cannot boast a single acrobat or liniment- 
vender. Nor even a professional fat man. A friend 
of mine, it is true, swells in that direction as an 
amateur, but he rolls night and morning as a correc- 
tive. I did once, also, pass an agreeable hour at a 
County Fair with a strong man who bends iron bars 
in his teeth. He had picked me from his audience as 
one of convincing weight to hang across the bar while 
he performed his trick. When the show was done, he 
introduced me to the Bearded Beauty and a talkative 
Mermaid from Chicago. One of my friends, also, has 
told me that she is acquainted with a lady — a former 
pupil of her Sunday school — who leaps on holidays in 
the park from a parachute. The bantam champion, 
too, many years ago, lived behind us around the cor- 
ner; but he was a distant hero, sated with fame, uncon- 
scious of our youthful worship. But these meetings 
are exceptional and accidental. Most of us, let us 
assume, find our acquaintance in the usual walks of 
life. Last night, therefore, having laid by the letters 
of Madame d'Arblay, on whose seven volumes I have 



im HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

been engaged for a month, I took up the Paste-Brush 
and was carried at once into another and unfamiliar 
world. 

The frontispiece is the big tent of the circus with 
side-shows in the foreground. There is a great wheel 
with its swinging baskets, a merry-go-round, a Funny- 
Castle, and a sword-swallower's booth. By a dense 
crowd around a wagon I am of opinion that here 
nothing less than red lemonade is sold. Certainly 
Jolly Maude, "that mountain of flesh," holds a distant, 
surging crowd against the ropes. 

An article entitled "Freaks I Have Known" is 
worth the reading. You may care to know that a cele- 
brated missing-link — I withhold the lady's name — 
plays solitaire in her tent as she waits her turn. 
Bearded ladies, it is asserted, are mostly married and 
have a fondness for crocheting out of hours. A cer- 
tain three-legged boy, "the favorite of applauding 
thousands," tried to enlist for the war, but was re- 
jected because he broke up a pair of shoes. The Wild 
Man of Borneo lived and died in Waltham, Massa- 
chusetts. If the street and number were given, it 
would tempt me to a pilgrimage. Have I not jour- 
neyed to Concord and to Plymouth? Perhaps an old 
inhabitant — an antique spinster or rheumatic grocer 
— can still remember the pranks of the Wild Man's 
childhood. 

But in the Paste-Brush the pages of advertisement 
are best. Slot machines for chewing-gum are offered 
for sale — Merry- Widow swings, beach babies (a kind 



CIRCUS DAYS 127 



of doll), genuine Tiffany rings that defy the expert, 
second-hand saxophones, fountain pens at eight cents 
each and sofa pillows with pictures of Turkish 
beauties. 

But let us suppose that you, my dear sir, are one 
of those seventy thousand subscribers and are by pro- 
fession a tattooer. On the day of publication with 
what eagerness you scan its columns! Here is your 
opportunity to pick up an improved outfit — "stencils 
and supphes complete, with twelve chest designs and 
a picture of a tattooed lady in colors, twelve by eight- 
een, for display. Send for price list." Or if you 
have skill in charming snakes and your stock of vipers 
is running low, write to the Snake King of Florida 
for his catalogue. "He treats you right." Here is 
an advertisement of an alligator farm. Alligator- 
wrestlers, it is said, make big money at popular resorts 
on the southern circuit. You take off your shoes and 
stockings, when the crowd has gathered, and wade into 
the slimy pool. It needs only a moderate skill to 
seize the fierce creature by his tail and haul him to the 
shore. A deft movement throws him on his back. 
Then you tickle him under the ear to calm him and 
pass the hat. 

Here in the Paste-Brush is an announcement of a 
ship-load of monkeys from Brazil. Would you care 
to buy a walrus? A crocodile is easy money on the 
Public Square in old-home week. Or perhaps you are 
a glass-blower with your own outfit, a ventriloquist, a 
diving beauty, a lyric tenor or a nail-eater. If so, here 



1^8 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

is an agent who will book you through the West. The 
small cities and large towns of Kansas yearn for you. 
Or if you, my dear madam, are of good figure, the 
Alamo Beauties, touring in Mississippi, want your 
services. Long season. No back pay. 

Would you like to play a tuba in a ladies' orchestra? 
You are wanted in Oklahoma. The Sunshine Girls — 
famous on western circuits — are looking to augment 
their number. "Wanted; Woman for Eliza and 
Ophelia. Also a child for Eva. Must double as a 
pony. State salary. Canada theatres." 

It is affirmed that there is money in box-ball, that 
hoop-la yields a fortune, that "you mop up the tin" 
with a huckley-buck. It sounds easy. I wonder what 
a huckley-buck is like. I wonder if I have ever seen 
one. It must be common knowledge to the readers 
of the Paste-Brush, for the term is not explained. 
Perhaps one puts a huckley-buck in a wagon and 
drives from town to town. Doubtless it returns a 
fortune in a County Fair. Is this not an opportunity 
for an underpaid school-teacher or slim seamstress? 
No longer must she subsist upon a pittance. Here is 
rest for her blue, old fingers. Let her write today for 
a catalogue. She should choose a huckley-buck of 
gaudy color, with a Persian princess on the side, to 
draw the crowd. Let her stop by the village pump 
and sound a stirring blast upon her megaphone. 

Or perhaps you, my dear sir, have been chafing in 
an indoor job. You have been hooped through a 
dreary winter upon a desk. If so, your gloomy dis- 



CIRCUS DAYS no 



position can be mended by a hoop-la booth, whatever 
it is. "This way, gentlemen! Try your luck! Posi- 
tively no blanks. A valuable prize for everybody." 
Your stooped shoulders will straighten. Your diges- 
tion will come to order in a month. Or why not run a 
stand at the beach for walking-sticks, with a view in 
the handle of a "dashing French actress in a daring 
pose, or the latest picture of President and Mrs. Wil- 
son at the Peace Conference." 

Or curiosities may be purchased — "two-headed 
giants, mermaids, sea-serpents, a devil-child and an 
Egyptian mummy. New lists ready." A mummy 
would be a quiet and profitable companion for our 
seamstress in the long vacation. It would need less 
attention than a sea-serpent. She should announce 
the dusty creature as the darling daughter of the 
Ptolemies. When the word has gone round, she may 
sit at ease before the booth in scarlet overalls and 
count the dropping nickels. With what vigor will 
she take to her thimble in the autunm! 

Out in Gilmer, Texas, there is a hog with six legs — 
"alive and healthy. Five hundred dollars take it." 
Here is a merchant who will sell you "snake, frog and 
monkey tights." After your church supper, on the 
stage of the Sunday school, surely, in such a costume, 
my dear madam, you could draw a crowd. Study 
the trombone and double your income. Can you 
yodle? "It can be learned at home, evenings, in six 
easy lessons." 



180 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

A used popcorn engine is cut in half. A waffle 
machine will be shipped to you on trial. Does no one 
wish to take the road with a five-legged cow? Here 
is one for sale — an extraordinary animal that cleaned 
up sixty dollars in one afternoon at a County Fair in 
Indiana. "Walk up, ladies and gentlemen! The 
marvel of the age. Plenty of time before the big show 
starts. A five-legged cow. Count 'em. Answers to 
the name of Guenevere. Shown before all the 
crowned heads of Europe. Once owned by the Czar 
of Russia. Only a dime. A tenth of a dollar. Ten 
cents. Show about to start." 

Or perhaps you think it more profitable to buy a 
steam calliope — some very good ones are offered 
second-hand in the Paste-Brush — and tour your 
neighboring towns. Make a stand at the crossroads 
under the soldiers' monument. Give a free concert. 
Then when the crowd is thick about you, offer them a 
magic ointment. Rub an old man for his rheumatism. 
Throw away his crutch, clap him on the back and pro- 
nounce him cured. Or pull teeth for a dollar each. 
It takes but a moment for a diagnosis. When once 
the fashion starts, the profitable bicuspids will drop 
around you. 

And Funny Castles can be bought. Perhaps you do 
not know what they are. They are usual in amuse- 
ment parks. You and a favorite lady enter, hand in 
hand. It is dark inside and if she is of an agreeable 
timidity she leans to your support. Only if you are a 



CIRCUS DAYS 131 



churl will you deny your arm. Then presently a fiery 
devil's head flashes beside you in the passage. The 
flooring tilts and wobbles as you step. Here, surely, 
no lady will wish to keep her independence. Presently 
a picture opens in the wall. It is souls in hell, or the 
Queen of Sheba on a journey. Then a sharp draft 
ascends through an opening in the floor. Your lady 
screams and minds her skirts. A progress through a 
Funny Castle, it is said, ripens the greenest friendship. 
Now take the lady outside, smooth her off and regale 
her with a lovers' sundae. Funny Castles, with wind 
machines, a Queen of Sheba almost new, and devil's 
head complete, can be purchased. Remit twenty-five 
per cent with order. The balance on delivery. 

Perhaps I am too old for these high excitements. 
Funny Castles are behind me. Ladies of the circus, 
alas! who ride in golden chariots are no longer beau- 
tiful. Cleopatra in her tinsel has sunk to the common 
level. Clowns with slap-sticks rouse in me only a 
moderate delight. 

At this moment, as I write, the clock strikes twelve. 
It is noon and school is out. There is a slamming of 
desks and a rush for caps. The boys scamper on the 
stairs. They surge through the gate. The acrobat 
on the billboard greets their eyes — ^the clown, also the 
lady with the pink legs. They pause. They gather in 
a circle. They have fallen victims to her smile. They 
mark the great day in their memory. 

The wind is from the south. The daffodils flourish 
along the fences. The street organ hangs heavily on 



IS^ 



HINTS TO PILGRIMS 



its strap. There will be a parade in the morning. 
The freaks will be on their platforms by one o'clock. 
The great show starts at two. I shall buy tickets and 
take Nepos, my nephew. 




In Praise of a Lawn-Mower. 

1DO not recall that anyone has written the praises 
of a lawn-mower. I seem to sow in virgin soil. 
One could hardly expect a poet to lift up his 
voice on such a homely theme. By instinct he prefers 
the more rhythmic scythe. Nor, on the other hand, 
will mechanical folk pay a full respect to a barren 
engine without cylinders and motive power. But to 
me it is just intricate enough to engage the interest. 
I can trace the relation of its wheels and knives, and 
see how the lesser spinning starts the greater. In a 
printing press, on the contrary, I hear only the general 
rattle. Before a gas-engine, also, I am dumb. Its 
sixteen processes to an explosion baffle me. I could 
as easily digest a machine for setting type. I nod 
blankly, as if a god explained the motion of the stars. 
Even when I select a motor I take it merely on repu- 
tation and by bouncing on the cushions to test its 
comfort. 

It has been a great many years since I was last 
intimate with a lawn-mower. My acquaintance began 
in the days when a dirty face was the badge of free- 
dom. One early Saturday morning I was hard at 
work before breakfast. Mother called down through 
the upstairs shutters, at the first clicking of the knives, 
to ask if I wore my rubbers in the dew. With the 
money earned by noon, I went to Conrad's shop. The 



134^ HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

season for tops and marbles had gone by. But in the 
window there was a peerless baseball with a rubber 
core, known as a cock-of-the-walk. By indecision, 
even by starting for the door, I bought it a nickel off 
because it was specked by flies. 

It did not occur to me last week, at first, that I 
could cut the grass. I talked with an Irishman who 
keeps the lawn next door. He leaned on his rake, took 
his pipe from his mouth and told me that his time was 
full. If he had as many hands as a centipede — so he 
expressed himself — he could not do all the work that 
was asked of him. The whole street clamored for his 
service. Then I talked with an Italian on the other 
side, who comes to work on a motor-cycle with his 
lawn-mower across his shoulder. His time was worth 
a dollar an hour, and he could squeeze me in after 
supper and before breakfast. But how can I con- 
sistently write upstairs — I am puttering with a novel 
— ^with so expensive a din sounding in my ears ? My 
expected royalties shrink beside such swollen pay. So 
I have become my own yard-man. 

Last week I had the lawn-mower sharpened, but it 
came home without adjustment. It went down the 
lawn without clipping a blade. What a struggle I 
had as a child getting the knives to touch along their 
entire length ! I remember it as yesterday. What an 
ugly path was left when they cut on one side only! 
My bicycle chain, the front wheel that wobbled, the 
ball-bearings in the gear, none of these things were so 
perplexing. Last week I got out my screw-driver 



IN PRAISE OF A LAWN-MOWER 135 

with somewhat of my old feeling of impotence. I sat 
down on the grass with discouragement in contempla- 
tion. One set of screws had to be loosened while 
another set was tightened, and success lay in the deli- 
cacy of my advance. What was my amazement to 
discover that on a second trial my mower cut to its 
entire width! Even when I first wired a base-plug 
and found that the table lamp would really light, I 
was not more astonished. 

This success with the lawn-mower has given me 
hope. I am not, as I am accused, all thumbs. I may 
yet become a handy man around the house. Is the 
swirl of furnace pipes inside my intellect? Perhaps I 
can fix the leaky packing in the laundry tubs, and 
henceforth look on the plumber as an equal brother. 
My dormant brain cells at last are wakened. But I 
must curb myself. I must not be too useful. There 
is no rest for a handy man. It is ignorance that per- 
mits a vacant holiday. At most I shall admit a 
familiarity with base-plugs and picture-wire and 
rubber washers — perhaps even with canvas awnings, 
which smack pleasantly of the sea — but I shall commit 
myself no further. 

Once in a while I rather enjoy cleaning the garage 
— raking down the cobwebs from the walls and win- 
dows with a stream from the hose — puddling the dirt 
into the central drain. I am ruthless with old oil cans 
and with the discarded clothing of the chauffeur we 
had last month. Why is an old pair of pants stuffed 
so regularly in the tool drawer? There is a barrel at 



136 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

the alley fence — but I shall spare the details. It was 
the river Alpheus that Hercules turned through the 
Augean stables. They had held three thousand oxen 
and had not been cleaned for thirty years. Dear me ! 
I know oxen. I rank this labor ahead of the killing 
of the Hydra, or fetching the golden apples of the 
Hesperides. Our garage can be sweetened with a 
hose. 

But I really like outside work. Last week I pulled 
up a quantity of dock and dandelions that were 
strangling the grass. And I raked in seed. This 
morning, when I went out for the daily paper, I saw 
a bit of tender green. The Reds, as I noticed in the 
headline of the paper, were advancing on Warsaw. 
France and England were consulting for the defense 
of Poland, but I ignored these great events and stood 
transfixed in admiration before this shimmer of new 
grass. 

Our yard, fore and aft, is about an afternoon's 
work. And now that I have cut it once I have signed 
up for the summer. It requires just the right amount 
of intelligence. I would not trust myself to pull 

weeds in the garden. M has the necessary skill 

for this. I might pull up the Canterbury beUs which, 
out of season, I consider unsightly stalks. And I do 
not enjoy clipping the grass along the walks. It is a 
kind of barber's job. But I Hke the long straight- 
aways, and I could wish that our grass plot stretched 
for another hundred feet. 

And I like the sound of a lawn-mower. It is such 



IN PRAISE OF A LAWN-MOWER 137 

a busy click and whirr. It seems to work so willingly. 
Not even a sewing-machine has quite so brisk a tempo. 
And when a lawn-mower strikes a twig, it stops 
suddenly on its haunches with such impatience to be 
off again. "Bend over, won't you," it seems to say, 
"and pull out that stick. These trees are a pesky 
nuisance. They keep dropping branches all the while. 
Now then! Are we ready? Whee! What's an 
apple? I can cut an apple all to flinders. You whistle 
and I'll whirr. Let's run down that slope together!" 



On Dropping Off to Sleep. 

I SLEEP too well — that is, I go to sleep too soon. 
I am told that I pass a few minutes of troubled 
breathing — not vulgar snores, but a kind of 
uneasy ripple on the shore of wakefulness — then I 
drift out with the silent tide. Doubtless I merit no 
sympathy for my perfection — and yet — 

Well, in the first place, lately we have had windy, 
moonlit nights and as my bed sets at the edge of the 
sleeping porch and the rail cuts off the earth, it is like 
a ride in an aeroplane to lie awake among the torn and 
ragged clouds. I have cast off the moorings of the 
sluggish world. Our garden with its flowering path, 
the coop for our neighbor's chickens, the apple tree, 
all have sunk from sight. The prow of my plane is 
pitched across the top of a waving poplar. Earth's 
harbor lights are at the stern. The Pleiades mark the 
channel to the open sky. I must hang out a lantern 
to fend me from the moon. 

I shall keep awake for fifteen minutes, I think. 
Perhaps I can recall Keats's sonnet to the night : 

"When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face. 
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance — " 

and those lines of Milton about the moon rising in 
clouded majesty, unveiling her peerless light. 

Here a star peeps out. Presently its companions 



ON DROPPING OFF TO SLEEP 139 

will show themselves and I shall know the constella- 
tion. Are they playing like little children at hide-and- 
seek? Do I catch Arcturus looking from its cover? 
Shall I shout hi-spy to Alpha Lyra? A shooting star, 
that has crouched behind a cloud, runs home to the 
goal untagged. Surely these glistening worlds cannot 
be hard-fisted planets like our own, holding a close 
schedule across the sky. They have looted the shining 
treasure of the sunset. They sail the high fantastic 
seas like caravels blown from India. In the twilight 
they have lifted vagrant anchors and they will moor 
in strange havens at the dawn. 

Are not these ragged clouds the garment of the 
night? Like the beggar maiden of an ancient tale she 
runs with flying raiment. She unmasks her beauty 
when the world's asleep. And the wind, like an eager 
prince upon his wooing, rides out of the stormy north. 

And then! Poof! Sleep draws its dark curtain 
across the glittering pageant — 

Presently I hear Annie, the cook, on the kitchen 
steps below, beating me up to 'breakfast. She sounds 
her unwelcome reveille on a tin pan with an iron spoon. 
Her first alarm I treat with indifference. It even 
weaves itself pleasantly into my dreams. I have been 
to a circus lately, let us say, and this racket seems to 
be the tom-tom of a side-show where a thin gentleman 
swallows snakes. Nor does a second outburst stir me. 
She only tries the metal and practices for the later din. 
At the third alarm I rise, for now she nurses a mighty 
wrath. I must humor the angry creature lest in her 



no HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

fury she push over a shelf of crockery. There is a 
cold jump for slippers — a chilly passage. 

I passed a week lately at a country hotel where 
there were a number of bad sleepers — ^men broken by 
the cares of business, but convalescent. Each morn- 
ing, as I dressed, I heard them on the veranda outside 
my window, exchanging their complaints. "Well," 
said one, "I slept three hours last night." "I wish I 
could," said a second. "I never do," said a third. No 
matter how little sleep the first man allowed himself, 
the second clipped off an hour. The third man told 
the bells he had heard — one and two and three and 
four — both Baptist and Methodist — and finished with 
his preceding competitor at least a half hour down. 
But always there was an old man — an ancient man 
with flowing beard — who waited until all were done, 
and concluded the discussion just at the breakfast 
gong: ''I never slept a wink" This was the perfect 
score. His was the golden cup. Whereupon the in- 
somnious veranda hung its defeated head with shame, 
and filed into the dining-room to be soothed and com- 
forted with griddle-cakes. 

This daily contest recalled to me the story of the 
two men drowned in the Dayton and Johnstown floods 
who boasted to each other when they came to heaven. 
Has the story gone the rounds? For a while they 
were the biggest lions among all the angels, and harps 
hung untuned and neglected in their presence. As 
often as they met in the windy portico of heaven, one 
of these heroes, falling to reminiscence of the flood 



ON DROPPING OFF TO SLEEP lU 

that drowned him, lifted the swirling water of Johns- 
town to the second floor. The other hero, not to be 
outdone, drenched the Dayton garrets. The first was 
now compelled to submerge a chimney. Turn by turn 
they mounted in competition to the top of familiar 
steeples. But always an old man sat by — an ancient 
man with flowing beard — ^who said "Fudge!" in a tone 
of great contempt. Must I continue? Surely you 
have guessed the end. It was the old mariner himself. 
It was the survivor of Ararat. It was Noah. Once, 
I myself, among these bad sleepers on the veranda, 
boasted that I had heard the bells at two o'clock, but 
I was scorned as an unfledged novice in their high 
convention. 

Sleeping too well seems to argue that there is 
nothing on your mind. Your head, it is asserted by 
the jealous, is a vacancy that matches the empty spaces 
of the night. It is as void as the untwinkling north. 
If there has been a rummage, they affirm, of important 
matters all day above your ears, it can hardly be 
checked at once by popping the tired head down upon 
a pillow. These fizzing squibs of thought cannot be 
smothered in a blanket. When one has planned a 
railroad or a revolution, the mighty churning still 
progresses in the dark. A dubious franchise must be 
gained. Villains must be pricked down for execution. 
Or bankers have come up from Paraguay, and one 
meditates from hour to hour on the sureness of the 
loan. Or perhaps an imperfect poem searches for a 
rhyme, or the plot of a novel sticks. 



U^ HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

It is the shell, they say, which is fetched from the 
stormy sea that roars all night. My head, alas, by the 
evidence, is a shell which is brought from a stagnant 
shore. 

Tired Nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep ! Sleep 
that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care! That is all 
very well, and pretty poetry, but I am afraid, when 
everything is said, that I am a sleepy-head. I do not, 
of course, have to pinch myself at a business meeting. 
At high noon I do not hear the lotus song. I do not 
topple, full of dreams, off the platform of a street-car. 
The sleepy poppy is not always at my nose. 

Nor do I yawn at dinner behind a napkin, or doze 
in the firelight when there are guests about. My 
manners keep me from this boorishness. In an ex- 
tremity, if they sit too late, I stir the fire, or I put my 
head out of doors for the wind to waken me. I show 
a sudden anxiety whether the garage is locked. I 
pretend that the lawn-mower is left outside, or that 
the awnings are loose and flapping. But I do not 
dash out the lights when our guests are still upon the 
steps. I listen at the window until I hear their motor 
clear the corner. Then I turn furiously to my buttons. 
I kick off my shoes upon the staircase. 

Several of us were camping once in the woods 
north of Lake Superior. As we had no guides we did 
all the work ourselves, and everyone was of harder 
endurance than myself. Was it not Pippa who cried 
out "Morning's at seven"? Seven! I look on her as 
being no better than a slug-a-bed. She should have 



ON DROPPING OFF TO SLEEP 1^3 

had her dishes washed and been on her way by six. 
Our day began at five. Our tents had to be taken 
down, our blankets and duffle packed. We were regu- 
larly on the water an hour before Pippa stirred a foot. 
And then there were four or five hours of paddling, 
perhaps in windy water. And then a new camp was 
made. Our day matched the exertions of a traveling 
circus. In default of expert knowledge I carried 
water, cut brouse for the beds and washed dishes. 
Little jobs, of an unpleasant nature, were found for 
me as often as I paused. Others did the showy, light- 
fingered work. I was housemaid and roustabout from 
sunrise to weary sunset. I was never allowed to rest. 
Nor was I permitted to flop the bacon, which I con- 
sider an easy, sedentary occupation. I acquired, 
unjustly, — let us agree in this! — a reputation for lazi- 
ness, because one day I sat for several hours in a blue- 
berry patch, when work was going forward. 

And then one night, when all labor seemed done 
and there was an hour of twilight, I was asked to read 
aloud. Everyone settled himself for a feast of Shake- 
speare's sonnets. But it was my ill luck that I selected 
the sonnet that begins, "Weary with toil, I haste me to 
my bed." A great shout went up — a shout of derision. 
That night I read no more. I carried up six or eight 
pails of water from the spring and followed the 
sonneteer's example. 

There are a great many books that I would hke to 
read of a winter's evening if I could stay awake — all 
of the histories, certainly, of Fiske. And Rhodes, 



lU HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

perhaps. I might even read "The Four Horsemen," 
"Trilby" and "The Education of Henry Adams," so 
as not to be alone. It is snug by the fire, and the very 
wind taps on the window as if it asked for invitation 
to share the hearth. I could compile a list, a five-foot 
shelf, for these nights of tempest. There is a writer 
in a Boston paper who tells us every week the 
books that he would like to read. His is a prospect 
rather than a review, for it is based on his anticipation. 
But does he ever read these books? Perhaps he, too, 
dozes. His book slips off his knee and his chin drops 
to comfort on his front. Let me inform him that a 
wood fire — if the logs are hardly dry — ^is a corrective. 
Its debility, as water oozes at the end, requires attend- 
ance every five minutes. Even Wardle's fat boy at 
Manor Farm could have lasted through the evening if 
the poker had been forced into his hand so often. "I 
read," says Tennyson, "before my eyelids dropt their 
shade." And wasn't Alice sitting with her book when 
she fell asleep and down the rabbit-hole? "And so 
to bed," writes Pepys. He, too, then, is one of us. 

I wonder if that phrase — ^he who runs may read — 
has not a deeper significance than lies upon the sur- 
face. Perhaps the prophet — was it Habakkuk who 
wrote the line? — ^it does not matter — perhaps the 
bearded prophet had himself the sleepy habit, and kept 
moving briskly for remedy around his study. I can 
see him in dressing-gown and slippers, with book in 
hand — ^his whiskers veering in the wind — quickening 



ON DROPPING OFF TO SLEEP H5 

his lively pace around the kerosene lamp, steering 
among the chairs, stumbling across the cat — 

In ambition I am a night-hawk. I would like to sit 
late with old books and reconstruct the forgotten 
world at midnight. These bells that I hear now across 
the darkness are the mad bells of Saint Bartholomew. 
With that distant whistle — a train on the B. & O. — 
Guy Fawkes gathers his villains to light the fuse. 
Through my window from the night I hear the sounds 
of far-off wars and kingdoms falling. 

And I would like, also, at least in theory, to sit 
with a merry company of friends, and let the cannikin 
clink till dawn. 

I would like to walk the streets of our crowded city 
and marvel at the windows — ^to speculate on the thou- 
sand dramas that weave their webs in our common life. 
Here is mirth that shakes its sides when its neighbors 
sleep. Here is a hungry student whose ambition 
builds him rosy castles. Here is a light at a fevered 
pillow where hope burns dim. 

On some fairy night I would wish to wander in the 
woods, when there are dancing shadows and a moon. 
Here Oberon holds state. Here Titania sleeps. I 
would cross a silver upland. I would stand on a 
barren hill-top, like the skipper of the world in its 
whirling voyage. 

But these high accomplishments are beyond me. 
Habakkuk and the fat boy, and Alice and Pepys and 
I, and all the others, must be content. Even the wet 
wood and the poker fail. The very wind grows sleepy 



H6 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

at the window. Our chins fall forward. Our books 
slip off our knees. 

And now, at last, our buoyant bed floats among the 
stars. I have cast off the moorings of the sluggish 
world. Earth's harbor lights are at the stern. The 
Pleiades mark the channel to the moon — 

Poof! Sleep draws again its dark curtain across 
the glittering pageant. 



Who Was Jeremy? 

WHO was Jeremy Bentham? I have run 
on his name recently two or three times. 
I could, of course, find out. The Encyclo- 
pedia — ^volume Aus to Bis — ^would enlighten me. 
Right now, downstairs in the bookcase — up near the 
top where the shabby books are kept — among the old 
Baedekers — there is a life of him by Leslie Stephen. 
No ! That is a life of Hobbes. I don't know anything 
about Hobbes either. It seems to me that he wrote 
the "Leviathan," whatever that was. But there is a 
Bentham somewhere around the house. But I have 
not read it. 

In a rough way I know who Bentham was. He 
lived perhaps a hundred years ago and he had a theory 
of utility. Utility was to clean the infected world. 
Even the worst of us were to rise out of the tub white 
and perfect. It was Bentham who wished to revisit 
the world in a hundred years to see how sweet and 
clean we had become. He was to utility what Malthus 
was to population. Malthus ! There is another hard 
one. It is the kind of name that is cut round the 
top of a new City Hall to shame citizens by their 
ignorance. 

I can go downstairs this minute and look up Ben- 
tham. Is it worth while? But then I might be called 
to dinner in the middle of the article, or I might be 



US HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

wanted to move the refrigerator. There is a musty 
smell, it seems, in the drain pipe, and the stubborn 
casters are turned sidewise. It hardly seems worth 
the chance and effort. 

There are a great many things that really do stir 
my curiosity, and even those things I don't look up. 
Or tardily, after my ignorance has been exposed. The 
other day the moon arose — as a topic — at the round 
table of the club where I eat lunch. It had really 
never occurred to me that we had never seen its other 
side, that we never could — except by a catastrophe — 
unless it smashed into a planet and was thrown heels 
up. How does it keep itself so balanced that one face 
is forever hid? Try to roll an apple around a pump- 
kin and meanwhile spin the pumpkin. Try this on 
your carpet. I take my hat off to the moon. 

I have been very ignorant of the moon. All of 
these years I have regarded it as a kindly creature that 
showed itself now and then merely on a whim. It was 
just jogging around of an evening, so I supposed, and 
looked us up. It was an old neighbor who dropped in 
after dinner, as it were, for a bit of gossip and an 
apple. But even the itinerant knife-grinder — ^whose 
whirling wheel I can hear this minute below me in the 
street — even the knife-grinder has a route. He knows 
at what season we grow dull. What necessity, then, 
of ours beckons to the moon? Perhaps it comes with 
a silver brush to paint the earth when it grows shabby 
with the traffic of the day. Perhaps it shows itself to 
stir a lover who halts coldly in his suit. The pink god. 



WHO WAS JEREMY? H3 

they say, shoots a dangerous arrow when the moon 
isfuU. 

The extent of my general ignorance is amazing. 
And yet, I suppose, by persistence and energy I could 
mend it. Old Doctor Dwight used to advise those of 
us who sat in his classroom to read a hard book for 
half an hour each day. How those half hours would 
mount up through the years! What a prodigious 
background of history, of science, of literature, one 
would gain as the years revolved! If I had followed 
his advice I would today be bursting with knowledge 
of Jeremy Bentham ; I would never have been tripped 
upon the moon. 

How ignorant most of us are of the times in which 
we live! We see the smoke and fires of revolution in 
Europe. We hear the cries of famine and disease, but 
our perception is lost in the general smudge. How are 
the Balkans parceled? How is the nest of nationali- 
ties along the Danube disposed? This morning there 
is revolt in Londonderry. What parties are opposite 
in the quarrel? Trouble brews in Chile. Is Tacni- 
Arica a district or a mountain range? The Aland 
Islands breed war in the north. Today there is a 
casualty list from Bagdad. The Bolsheviki advance 
on Warsaw. Those of us who are cobblers tap our 
shoes unruffled, tailors stitch, we bargain in the market 
— all of us go about on little errands without excite- 
ment when the news is brought. 

And then there is mechanics. This is now so pre- 
eminently a mechanical world that no one ought to be 



150 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

entirely ignorant of cylinders and cogs and carbure- 
tors. And yet my own motor is as dark as Africa. 
I am as ignorant of a carburetor as of the black 
stomach of a zebra. Once a carpenter's bench was 
given me at Christmas, fitted up with all manner of 
tricky tools. The bookshelves I built in my first high 
enthusiasm have now gone down to the basement to 
hold the canned fruit, where they lean with rickets 
against the wall. Even the box I made to hold the 
milk bottles on the back steps has gone the way of 
flesh. Any chicken-coop of mine would topple in the 
wind. Well-instructed hens would sit around on 
fence-posts and cackle at my efforts with a saw. 
Certainly, if a company of us were thrown on a desert 
island, it would not be I who proved the Admirable 
Crichton. Not by my shrewdness could we build a 
hut. Robinson Crusoe contrived a boat. If I tied a 
raft together it would be sure to sink. 

Where are the Virgin Islands ? What makes a tea- 
pot bubble? What forces bring the rain and tempest? 

In cooking I go no farther than an egg. Birds, to 
me, are either sparrows or robins. I know an elm and 
a maple, but hemlocks and pines and firs mix me up. 
I am not to be trusted to pull the weeds. Up would 
come the hollyhocks. Japanese prints and Chinese 
vases sit in a world above me. 

I can thump myself in front without knowing 
whether I jar my stomach or my liver. I have no 
notion where my food goes when it disappears. When 
once I have tilted my pudding off its spoon my knowl- 



WHO WAS JEREMY? 151 

edge ceases. It is as a child of Israel on journey in 
the wilderness. Does it pass through my thorax? 
And where do my lungs branch off? 

I know nothing of etchings, and I sit in gloomy 
silence when friends toss Whistler and Rembrandt 
across the table. I know who our mayor is, but I 
scratch my head to name our senator. And why does 
the world crumple up in hills and mountains ? 

I could look up Jeremy Bentham and hereafter I 
would know all about him. And I could look up the 
moon. And Hobbes. And Leslie Stephen, who 
wrote a book about him. And a man named Maitland 
who wrote a life of Stephen. Somebody must have 
written about Maitland. I could look him up, too. 
And I could read about the Balkans and tell my neigh- 
bors whether they are tertiary or triassic. I could 
pursue the thorax to its lair. Saws and chicken-coops, 
no doubt, are an engaging study. I might take a tree- 
book to the country, or seek an instructive job in a 
garage. 

But what is the use? Right in front of Jeremy 
Bentham, in Aus to Bis, is George Bentham, an Eng- 
lish botanist. To be thorough I would have to read 
about him also. Then following along is Bentivoglio, 
and Benzene — a long article on benzene. And Beo- 
wulf! No educated person should be quite ignorant 
of him. Albrecht Bitzius was a Swiss novelist. Some- 
how he has escaped me entirely. And Susanna 
Blamire, "the muse of Cumberland" ! She sounds en- 
gaging. Who is there so incurious that he would not 



152 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

give an evening to Borneo? And the Bryophyta? — 
which I am glad to learn include "the mosses and the 
liverworts." Dear me! it is quite discouraging. 

And then, when I am gaining information on 
Hobbes, the Hittites, right in front, take my eye. 
Hilarius wrote "light verses of the goliardic type" — 
whatever that means. And the hippopotamus! "the 
largest representative of the non-ruminating artio- 
dactyle ungulate manmials." I must sit with the 
hippopotamus and worm his secret. 

And after I have learned to use the saw, I would 
have to take up the plane. And then the auger. And 
Whistler. And Japanese prints. And a bird book. 

It is very discouraging. 

I stand with Pope. Certainly, unless one is very 
thirsty and has a great deal of vacant time, it is best 
to avoid the Pierian spring. 

Jeremy can go and hang himself. I am learning to 
play golf. 



A Chapter for Children. 

ONCE upon a time — for this is the way a story- 
should begin — there lived in a remote part 
of the world a family of xjhildren whose 
father was busy all day making war against his 
enemies. And so, as their mother, also, was busy 
(clubs, my dear, and parties) , they were taken care of 
and had their noses wiped — but in a most kindly way 
— by an old man who loved them very much. 

Now this old man had been a jester in his youth. 
For these were the children of a king and so, of course, 
they had a jester, just as you and I, if we are rich, 
have a cook. He had been paid wages — I don't know 
how many kywatskies — merely to stand in the dining- 
room and say funny things, and nobody asked him to 
jump around for the salt or to hurry up the waffles. 
And he didn't even brush up the crumbs afterward. 

I do not happen to know the children of any king — 
there is not a single king living on our street — yet, 
except for their clothes, they are much like other 
children. Of course they wear shinier clothes. It is 
not the shininess that comes from sliding down the 
stair rail, but a royal shininess, as though it were 
always eleven o'clock on Sunday morning and the 
second bell of the Methodist church were ringing, with 
several deacons on the steps. For if one's father is a 
king, ambassadors and generals keep dropping in all 



15i HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

the time, and queens, dressed up in brocade so stiff 
you can hear them breathe. 

One day the children had been sliding down hill in 
the snow — on Flexible Flyers, painted red — and their 
mittens and stockings were wet. So the old man felt 
their feet — ^tickling their toes — and set them, bare- 
legged, in a row, in front of the nursery fire. And he 
told them a story. 

"O children of the king!" he began, and with that 
he wiped their noses all round, for it had been a cold 
day, when even the best-mannered persons snuffle now 
and then. "O children of the king!" he began again, 
and then he stopped to light a taper at the fire. For 
he was a wise old man and he knew that when there is 
excitement in a tale, a light will keep the bogies off. 
This old man could tell a story so that your eyes 
opened wider and wider, as they do when Annie brings 
in ice-cream with raspberry sauce. And once in a 
while he said Odd Zooks, and God-a-Mercy when he 
forgot himself. 

"Once upon a time," he began, "there lived a king 
in a far-off country. To get to that country, O chil- 
dren of a king, you would have to turn and turn, and 
spell out every signpost. And then you climb up the 
sides of seventeen mountains, and swim twenty-three 
streams precisely. Here you wait till dusk. But 
just before the lamps are lighted, you get down on all- 
fours — if you are a boy (girls, I believe, don't have 
all-fours) — and crawl under the sofa. Keep straight 
on for an hour or so with the coal-scuttle three points 



A CHAPTER FOR CHILDREN 155 

starboard, but be careful not to let your knees touch 
the carpet, for that wears holes in them and spoils the 
magic. Then get nurse to pull you out by the hind 
legs — and — there you are, 

"Once upon a time, then, there lived a king with a 
ferocious moustache and a great sword which rattled 
when he walked around the house. He made scratches 
all over the piano legs, but no one felt like giving him 
a paddy- whack. This king had a pretty daughter. 

"Now it is a sad fact that there was a war going on. 
It was between this king who had the pretty daughter 
and another king who lived near by, on an adjoining 
farm, so to speak. And the first king had sworn by 
his halidome — and at this his court turned pale — that 
he would take his enemy by his blasted nose. 

"Both of these kings lived in castles whose walls 
were thick and whose towers were high. And around 
their tops were curious indentings that looked as your 
teeth would look if every other one were pulled. 
These castles had moats with lily pads and green 
water in them, which was not at all healthful, except 
that persons in those days did not know about it and 
were consequently just as well off. And there were 
jousting fields and soup caldrons (with a barrel of 
animal crackers) and a tun of lemonade (six glasses 
to a lemon) — everything to make life comfortable. 

"Here's a secret. The other king who lived near 
by was in love with the first king's daughter. Here 
are two kings fighting each other, and one of them in 



156 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

love with the other's daughter, but not saying a word 
about it. 

"Now the second king — ^the one in love — was not 
very fierce, and his name was King Muffin — ^which 
suggests pleasant thoughts — ^whereas the first king 
with the beautiful daughter was called King Odd 
Zooks, Zooks the Sixth, for he was the sixth of his 
powerful line. And my story is to show how King 
Muffin got the better of King Zooks and married his 
daughter. It was a clever piece of business, for the 
walls of the castle were high, and the window of the 
Princess was way above the trees. King Muffin didn't 
even know which her window was, for it did not have 
any lace curtains and it looked no better than the 
cook's, except that the cook sometimes on Monday tied 
her stockings to the curtain cord to dry. And of 
course if King Muffin had come openly to the castle, 
the guards would have cut him all to bits. 

"One day in June King Muffin was out on horse- 
back. He had left his crown at home and was wearing 
his third-best clothes, so you would have thought that 
he was just an ordinary man. But he was a good 
horseman; that is, he wasn't thinking every minute 
about falling off, but sat loosely, as one might sit in 
a rocking-chair. 

"The country was beautiful and green, and in the 
sky there were puffy clouds that looked the way a pop- 
over looks before it turns brown — a big pop-over that 
would stuff even a hungry giant up to his ears. And 
there was a wind that wiggled everything, and the 



A CHAPTER FOR CHILDREN 157 

noise of a brook among the trees. Also, there were 
birds, but you must not ask me their names, for I am 
not good at birds. 

"King Muffin, although he was a brave man, loved 
a pleasant day. So he turned back his collar at the 
throat in order that the wind might tickle his neck 
and he dropped his reins on his horse's back in a care- 
less way that wouldn't be possible on a street where 
there were trolley-cars. In this fashion he rode on 
for several miles and sang to himself a great many 
songs. Sometimes he knew the words and sometimes 
he said turn turn te turn turn, but he kept to the tune. 

"King Muffin enjoyed his ride so much that before 
he knew it he was out of his own kingdom and at least 
six parasangs in the kingdom of King Zooks. My 
dear, use your handkerchief ! 

"And even then King Muffin would not have 
realized it, except that on turning a corner he saw a 
young man lying under a tree in a suit that was half 
green and half yellow. King Muffin knew him at once 
to be a jester — but whose? King Zooks's jester, of 
course, his mortal enemy. For jesters have to go off 
by themselves once in a while to think up new jokes, 
and no other king lived within riding distance. 
Really, the jester was thinking of rhymes to zithern, 
which is the name of the curious musical instrument 
he carried, and is a little like a mandolin, only harder 
to play. It cannot be learned in twelve easy lessons. 
And the jester was making a sorry business of it, for 



158 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

it is a difficult word to find rhymes to, as you would 
know if you tried. He was terribly woeful. 

"King Muffin said *Whoa' and stopped his horse. 
Then he said 'Good morning, fellow,' in the kind of 
superior tone that kings use. 

"The jester got off the ground and, as he did not 
know that Muffin was a king, he sneezed; for the 
ground was damp. It was a slow sneeze in coming, 
for the ground was not very wet, and he stood waiting 
for it with his mouth open and his eyes squinting. So 
King Muffin waited too, and had a moment to think. 
And as kings think very fast, very many thoughts 
came to him. So, by the time the sneeze had gone off 
like a shower bath, and before the pipes filled up for 
another, some interesting things had occurred to him. 
Well ! things about the Princess and how he might get 
a chance to speak with her. But he said : 

" 'Ho, ho! Methinks King Zooks's jester has the 
snuffles.' 

"At this, Jeppo — for that was the jester's name — 
looked up with a wry face, for he still kept a sneeze 
inside him which he couldn't dislodge. 

" 'By my boots and spurs!' the King cried again, 
'you are a woeful jester.' 

"Jeppo was woeful. For on this very night King 
Zooks was to give a grand dinner — ^not a simple 
dinner such as you have at home with Annie passing 
dishes and rattling the pie around the pantry — but a 
dinner for a hundred persons, generals and ambassa- 
dors, all dressed in lace and eating from gold plates. 



A CHAPTER FOR CHILDREN 159 

And of course everyone would look to Jeppo for 
something funny — maybe a new song with twenty 
verses and a rol-de-rol-rol chorus, which everyone 
could sing even if he didn't know the words. And 
Jeppo didn't know a single new thing. He had tried 
to write something, but had stuck while trying to think 
of a rhyme for zithern. So of course he was woeful. 
And King Muffin knew it. 

"All this while King Muffin was thinking hard, 
although he didn't scowl once, for some persons can 
think without scowling. He wished so much to see 
the Princess, and yet he knew that if he climbed the 
tallest tree he couldn't reach her window. And even 
if he found a ladder long enough, as likely as not he 
would lean it up against the cook's window, not notic- 
ing the stockings on the curtain cord. King Muffin 
should have looked glum. But presently he smiled. 

" * Jeppo,' he said, *what would you say if I offered 
to change places with you? Here you are fretting 
about that song of yours and the dinner only a few 
hours off. You will be flogged tomorrow, sure, for 
being so dull tonight. Just change clothes with me 
and go off and enjoy yourself. Sit in a tavern! 
Spend these kywatskies !' Here King Muffin rattled 
his pocket. *I'll take your place. I know a dozen 
songs, and they will tickle your king until, goodness 
me! he will cry into his soup.' King Muffin really 
didn't give King Zooks credit for ordinary manners, 
but then he was his mortal enemy, and pre j 'iced. 

"Well, Jeppo was terribly woeful and that word 



160 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

zithern was bothering him. There was pithern and 
dithern and mithern. He had tried them all, but none 
of them seemed to mean anything. So he looked at 
King Muffin, who sat very straight on his horse, for 
he wasn't at all afraid of him, although he was a tall 
horse and had nostrils that got bigger and littler all 
the time; and back legs that twitched. Meanwhile 
King Muffin twirled a gold chain in his fingers. Then 
Jeppo looked at King Muffin's clothes and saw that 
they were fashionable. Then he looked at his hat and 
there was a yellow feather in it. And those kywat- 
skies. King Muffin, just to tease him, twirled his 
moustache, as kings will. 

"So the bargain was made. There was a thicket 
near, so dense that it would have done for taking off 
your clothes when you go swimming. In this thicket 
King Muffin and Jeppo exchanged clothes. Of 
course Jeppo had trouble with the buttons for he had 
never dressed in such fine clothes before, and many of 
a king's buttons are behind. 

"And now, when the exchange was made, Jeppo 
inquired where he would find an expensive tavern 
with brass pull-handles on the lemonade vat, and he 
rode off, licking his lips and jingling his kywatskies. 
But King Muffin, dressed as a jester, vaulted on his 
horse and trotted in the direction of King Zooks's 
castle, which had indentings around the top like a row 
of teeth if every other one were pulled. 

"And after a little while it became night. It is my 
private opinion, my dear, which I shall whisper in the 



A CHAPTER FOR CHILDREN 161 

middle of your ear — the outer flap being merely orna- 
mental and for 'spection purposes — that the sun is 
afraid of the dark, because you never see him around 
after nightfall. Bless you, he goes off to bed before 
twilight and tucks himself to the chin before you or I 
would even think of lighting a candle. And, on my 
word, he prefers to sleep in the basenient. He goes 
down the back stairs and cuddles behind the furnace. 
And he has the bad habit, mercy! of reading in bed. 
A good half hour after he should be sound asleep, you 
can see the reflection of his candle on the evening 
clouds." 

At this point the old man paused a bit, to see if the 
children were still awake. Then he wiped their noses 
all around, not forgetting the youngest with the fat 
legs, and began again. 

"During all this time King Zooks had been getting 
ready for the party, trying on shiny coats, and getting 
his silk stockings so that the seams at the back went 
straight up and didn't wind around, which is the way 
they naturally do unless you are particular. And he 
put a clean handkerchief into every pocket, in case he 
sneezed in a hurry — for King Zooks was a lavish 
dresser. 

"His wife was dressing in another room, keeping 
three maids busy with safety pins and powder-puffs, 
and getting all of the snarls out of her hair. And, in 
still another room of the castle, his daughter was 
dressing. Now his wife was a nice-looking woman, 
like nurse, except that she wore stiff brocade and 



162 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

didn't jounce. But his daughter was beautiful and 
didn't need a powder-puff. 

"When they were all dressed they met outside, just 
to ask questions of one another about handkerchiefs 
and noses and behind the ears. The Queen, also, 
wished to be very sure that there wasn't a hole in the 
heel of her stocking, for she wore black stockings, 
which makes it worse. King Zooks was fond of his 
wife and fond of his daughter, and when he was with 
them he did not look so fierce. He kissed both of 
them, but when he kissed his daughter — ^which was the 
better fun — ^he took hold of her nose — but in a most 
kindly way — so that her face wouldn't slip. 

"Then they went down the marble stairs, with 
flunkies bowing up and down. 

"But how worried King Zooks would have been if 
he had known that at that very moment his enemy, 
King Muffin, was coming into the castle, disguised as 
a jester. Nobody stopped King Muffin, for wander- 
ing jesters were common in those days. 

"And now the party started with all its might. 

"King Zooks offered his arm to the wife of the Am- 
bassador, and Queen Zooks offered hers to the Gen- 
eral of the army. There was a fight around the Prin- 
cess, but she said eenie meenie minie moe, catch a 
nigger by the toe and counted them all out but one. 
And so they went down another marble stairway to 
the dining-room, where a band was blowing itself red 
in the face — ^the trombonist, in particular, seeming to 
be in great distress. 



A CHAPTER FOR CHILDREN 168 

"And where was King Muffin? 

"King Muffin came in by the postern — ^the back 
stoop, my dear — and he washed his hands and ears at 
the kitchen sink and went right up to the dining-room. 
And there he was standing behind the King's chair, 
where King Zooks couldn't see him but the Princess 
could. You can see from this what a crafty person 
King Muffin was. Queen Zooks, to be sure, could see 
him, but she was an unsuspicious person, and was very 
hungry. There were waffles for dinner, and when 
there were waffles she didn't even talk very much. 

"King Muffin was very funny. He told jokes 
which were old at his own castle, but were new to King 
Zooks. And King Zooks, thinking he was a real 
jester, laughed until he cried — only his tears did not 
get into his soup, for by that time the soup had been 
cleared away. A few of them, however — just a 
splatter — did fall on his fish, but it didn't matter as it 
was a salt fish anyway. But all the guests, inasmuch 
as they were eating away from home, had to be more 
particular. And when the rol-de-roUrol choruses 
came, how King Zooks sang, throwing back his head 
and forgetting all about his ferocious moustache ! 

"No one enjoyed the fun more than King Muffin. 
Whenever things quieted down a bit he said something 
even funnier than the last. But during all this time 
it had not occurred to King Zooks to inquire for 
Jeppo, or to ask why a new fool stood behind his chair. 
He just laughed and nudged the wife of the Ambassa- 



IGJf. HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

dor with his elbow and ate his waffles and enjoyed 
himself. 

"So the dinner grew merrier and merrier until at 
last everyone had had enough to eat. They would 
have pushed back a little from the table to be more 
comfortable in front, except for their manners. King 
Zooks was the last to finish, for the dinner ended with 
ice-cream and he was fond of it. He didn't have it 
ordinary days. In fact he was so eager to get the last 
bit that he scraped his spoon round and round upon 
the dish until Queen Zooks was ashamed of him. 
When, finally, he was all through, the guests folded 
their napkins and pushed back their chairs until you 
never heard such a squeak. A few of them — but these 
had never been out to dinner before — ^had spilled 
crumbs in their laps and had to brush them off. 

"And now there was a dance. 

"So King Zooks offered his arm to the wife of the 
Ambassador and Queen Zooks offered hers to the 
General of the army, and they started up the marble 
stairway to the ballroom. But what should King 
Muffin do but skip up to the Princess while she was 
still smoothing out her skirts. (Yellow organdie, my 
dear, and it musses when you sit on it. ) Muffin made 
a low bow and kissed her hand. Then he asked her 
for the first dance. It was so preposterous that a 
jester should ask her to dance at all, that everyone 
said it was the funniest thing he had done, and they 
went into a gale about it on the marble stairway. 
Even Queen Zooks, who ordinarily didn't laugh much 



A CHAPTER FOR CHILDREN 165 

at jokes, threw back her head and laughed quite loud 
— but in a minute, when everybody else was done. 
And then to everyone's surprise the Princess con- 
sented to dance with King Muffin, although the Gen- 
eral of the army stood by in a kind of empty fashion. 
But everybody was so merry, and in particular King 
Zooks, that no one minded. 

"King Muffin, when he danced with the Princess, 
looked at her very hard and softly, and she looked 
back at him as if she didn't mind it a bit. Evidently 
she knew him despite his disguise. And naturally she 
knew that he was in love with her. 

"Now King Muffin hadn't had a thing to eat, for 
jesters are supposed to eat at a little table afterwards. 
If they ate at the big table they would forget and sing 
sometimes with their mouths full and you know how 
that would sound. So he and the Princess went down- 
stairs to the pantry, where he ate seven cream puffs 
and three floating islands, one after the other, never 
spilling a bit on his blouse. He called them ^floatin' 
Irelands,' having learned it that way as a child, his 
nurse not correcting him. Then he felt better and they 
returned to the ballroom, where the dance was still 
going on with all its might. 

"King Muffin took the Princess out on the balcony, 
which was the place where young gentlemen, even in 
those days, took ladies when they had something par- 
ticular to say. He shut the door carefully and looked 
all around to make sure that there were no spies about, 
under the chairs, inside the vases. He even wiggled 



166 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

the rug for fear that there might be a trapdoor 
beneath. 

"Did the Princess love King Muffin? Of course 
she did. But she wasn't going to let him know it all 
at once. Ladies never do things like that. So she 
looked indifferent, as though she might yawn at any 
moment. Despite that, King Muffin told her what 
was on his mind, and when he was finished, he looked 
for an answer. But she didn't say anything, but just 
sat quiet and pretended there was a button off her 
dress. So King Muffin told it again, and moved up a 
bit. And this time her head nodded ever so little. But 
he saw it. So he reached down in his side pocket, so 
far that he had to straighten out his leg to get to the 
bottom. He brought up a ring. Then he slipped it 
on her finger, the next to the longest one on her left 
hand. After that he kissed her in a most affectionate 
way. 

"This was all very well, but of course King Zooks 
would never consent to their marriage. And if he 
discovered that the new jester was King Muffin, his 
guards would cut him all to slivers. For a minute 
they were woeful. Then a bright idea came to King 
Muffin— 

"Meanwhile the dance had been going on with all 
its might. First the General of the army danced with 
Queen Zooks. He was a very manly dancer and was 
quite stiff from the waist up, and she bounced around 
on tip-toe. Then the Ambassador danced with her, 
but his sword kept getting in her way. Then both of 



A CHAPTER FOR CHILDREN 167 

them, having done their duty, looked around for the 
Princess. They went to the lemonade room, for that 
was the first place naturally to look. Then they went 
to the cardroom, where the older persons were playing 
casino, and were sitting very solemn, as if it were not 
a party at all. 

"Then they went to King Zooks, who was jigghng 
on his toes, with his back to the fire, full and happy. 
* Where is your daughter, Majestical Majesty?' they 
asked. But as King Zooks didn't know he joined the 
search, and Queen Zooks, too. But she wasn't much 
good at it, for she had a long train and she couldn't 
turn a corner sharp, although her maids trotted after 
her and whisked it about as fast as possible. 

"But they couldn't find the Princess anywhere 
inside the castle. 

"After a while it occurred to King Zooks that the 
cook might know. She had gone to bed — leaving her 
dishes until morning — so up they climbed. She 
answered from under the covers, *Whajuwant?' which 
shows that she didn't talk English and was probably 
a Spanish cook or an Indian princess captured very 
young. So she got up, all excited. My! how she 
scuffed around, looking for her slippers, trying to find 
her clothes and getting one or two things on wrong 
side out ! She was so confused that she thought it was 
morning and brushed her teeth. 

"By this time an hour had passed and King 
Zooks was fidgety. He told his red- faced band to lean 



168 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

their trombones and other things up against the wall, 
so that he could think. Then he stroked his chin, while 
the court stood by and tried to think also. Finally the 
King sent a herald to proclaim around the castle how 
fidgety he was and that his daughter must be brought 
to him. But the Princess was not found. Meantime 
the band ate ice-cream and cocoanut macaroons, and 
appeared to enjoy itself. 

"In a tall tower that stands high above the trees 
there was a great clock, and, by and by, it began to 
strike the hour. It did not stop until it had struck 
ten times. So you see it was growing late and the 
King had the right to be getting fidgety. When the 
clock had done, those guests who were not in the habit 
of sitting up so late, began to grow sleepy; only, of 
course, they did not yawn out loud, but behind fans 
and things. 

"Meanwhile King Mufiin had gone downstairs to 
the stable. He brought out his horse with the flaring 
nostrils and another horse also. He took them around 
to the Princess, who sat waiting for him on a marble 
bench in the shadow of a tree. 

" *Climb up, beautiful Princess,' he said. 

"She hopped into her saddle and he into his. They 
were off like the wind. 

"They heard the clock strike ten and they saw the 
great tower rising above the castle with the silver moon 
upon it, but they galloped on and on. Through the 
forest they galloped, over bridges and streams. And 



A CHAPTER FOR CHILDREN 169 

the moon climbed off the tower and kept with them — 
as it does with all good folk — plunging through the 
clouds like a ship upon the ocean. And still they 
galloped on. Presently they met Jeppo returning 
from the tavern with the brass pull-handles. *Yo, ho !' 
called out the King, and they passed him in a flash. 
Clackety-clack-clackj clackety -clack-clack, clack-clack , 
clackety -clack! 

"And peasants, who usually slept right through the 
night, awoke at the sound of their hoofs and although 
they were very sleepy, they ran and looked out of 
their windows — being careful to put on slippers so 
as not to get the snuffles. And King Muffin and the 
Princess galloped by with the moonlight upon them, 
and the peasants wondered who they were. But as 
they were very sleepy, presently they went back to 
bed without finding out. One of them did, however, 
stumble against a chair, right on the toe, and had to 
light a candle to see if it were worth mending. 

"But in the morning the peasants found a bauble 
near the lodge-gate, a cap and bells on the ravine 
bridge, and on the long road to the border of King 
Muffin's land they found a jester's coat. 

"And to this day, although many years have passed, 
their children and their children's children, on the way 
from school, gather the lilies of the valley which 
flourish in the woods and along the roads. And they 
think that they are jesters' bells which were scattered 
in the flight." 



170 



HINTS TO PILGRIMS 



Whereupon the old man, having finished his story, 
wiped the noses of the children, not forgetting the 
youngest one with the fat legs, and sent them off to 
bed. 




" T/v^/^^*""^ ^^ '^' " ^ *• "• ■' — ^ 



The Crowded Curb. 

RECENTLY I came on an urchin in the 
crowded city, pitching pennies by himself, in 
the angle of an abutment. Three feet from 
his patched seat — a gay pattern which he tilted up- 
ward now and then — there moved a thick stream of 
shoppers. He was in solitary contest with himself, 
his evening papers neglected in a heap, wrapped in 
his score, unconscious of the throng that pressed 
against him. He was resting from labor, as a greater 
merchant takes to golf for his refreshment. The curb 
was his club. He had fetched his recreation down to 
business, to the vacancy between editions. Presently 
he will scoop his earnings to his pocket and will bawl 
out to his advantage our latest murder. 

How mad — how delightful our streets would be if 
all of us followed as unreservedly, with so little self- 
consciousness or respect of small convention, our 
innocent desires ! 

Who of us even whistles in a crowd? — or in the 
spring goes with a skip and leap? 

A lady of my acquaintance — who grows plump in 
her early forties — tells me that she has always wanted 
to run after an ice- wagon and ride up town, bouncing 
on the tail-board. It is doubtless an inheritance from 
a childhood which was stifled and kept in starch. A 
singer, also, of bellowing bass, has confided to me 



17^ HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

that he would like above all things to roar his tunes 
down town on a crowded crossing. The trolley-cars, 
he feels, the motors and all the shrill instruments of 
traffic, are no more than a sufficient orchestra for his 
lusty upper register. An old lady, too, in the daintiest 
of lace caps, with whom I lately sat at dinner, con- 
fessed that whenever she has seen hop-scotch chalked 
in an eddy of the crowded city, she has been tempted 
to gather up her skirts and join the play. 

But none of these folk obey their instinct. Opinion 
chills them. They plod the streets with gray exterior. 
Once, on Fifth Avenue, to be sure, when it was barely 
twilight, I observed a man, suddenly, without warn- 
ing, perform a cart-wheel, heels over head. He was 
dressed in the common fashion. Surely he was not 
an advertisement. He bore no placard on his hat. 
Nor was it apparent that he practiced for a circus. 
Rather, I think, he was resolved for once to let the 
stiff, censorious world go by unheeded, and be himself 
alone. 

On a night of carnival how greedily the crowd 
assumes the pantaloon! A day that was prim and 
solemn at the start now dresses in cap and bells. How 
recklessly it stretches its charter for the broadest jest! 
Observe those men in women's bonnets! With what 
delight they swing their merry bladders at the crowd ! 
They are hard on forty. All week they have bent to 
their heavy desks, but tonight they take their pay of 
life. The years are a sullen garment, but on a night 
of carnival they toss it off. Blood that was cold and 



THE CROWDED CURB 173 

temperate at noon now feels the fire. Scratch a man 
and you find a clown inside. It was at the celebration 
of the Armistice that I followed a sober fellow for a 
mile, who beat incessantly with a long iron spoon on 
an ash-can top. Almost solemnly he advanced among 
the throng. Was it joy entirely for the ending of the 
war? Or rather was he not yielding at last to an old 
desire to parade and be a band? The glad occasion 
merely loosed him from convention. That lady friend 
of mine, in the circumstance, would have bounced on 
ice-wagons up to midnight. 

For it is convention, rather than our years — it is the 
respect and fear of our neighbors that restrains us on 
an ordinary occasion. If we followed our innocent 
desires at the noon hour, without waiting for a carni- 
val, how mad our streets would seem ! The bellowing 
bass would pitch back his head and lament the fair 
Isolde. The old lady in lace cap would tuck up her 
skirts for hop-scotch and score her goal at last. 

Is it not the French who set aside a special night 
for foolery, when everyone appears in fancy costume ? 
They should set the celebration forward in the day, 
and let the blazing sun stare upon their mirth. Merri- 
ment should not wait upon the owl. 

The Dickey Club at Harvard, I think, was fash- 
ioned with some such purpose of release. Its initia- 
tion occurs always in the spring, when the blood of 
an undergraduate is hottest against restraint. It is 
a vent placed where it is needed most. Zealously 
the candidates perform their pranks. They exceed 



17 i, HINTS TO PILGRIMS 



the letter of their instruction. The streets of Boston 
are a silly spectacle. Young men wear their trousers 
inside out and their coats reversed. They greet 
strangers with preposterous speech. I once came on 
a merry fellow eating a whole pie with great mouth- 
fuls on the Court House steps, explaining meantime 
to the crowd that he was the youngest son of Little 
Jack Horner. And, of course, with such a hardened 
gourmand for an ancestor, he was not embarrassed by 
his ridiculous posture. 

But it is not youth which needs the stirring most. 
Nor need one necessarily play an absurd antic to be 
natural. And therefore, here at home, on our own 
Soldiers' Monument — on its steps and pediment that 
mount above the street — I offer a few suggestions to 
the throng. 

Ladies and gentlemen! I invite you to a carnival. 
Here! Now! At noon! I bid you to throw off your 
solemn pretense. And be yourself! That sober 
manner is a cloak. Your dignity scarcely reaches to 
your skin. Does no one desire to play leap-frog 
across those posts? Do none of you care to skip and 
leap? What! Will no one accept my invitation? 

You, my dear sirs, I know you. You play chess 
together every afternoon in your club. One of you 
carries at this moment a small board in his waistcoat 
pocket. Why hurry to your club, gentlemen? Here 
on this step is a place to play your game. Surely your 
concentration is proof against the legs that swing 
around you. And you, my dear sir! I see that you 



THE CROWDED CURB 175 

are a scholar by your bag of books. You chafe for 
your golden studies. Come, sit alongside I Here is a 
shady spot for the pursuit of knowledge. Did not 
Socrates ply his book in the public concourse? 

My dear young lady, it is evident that a desire has 
seized you to practice your soprano voice. Why do 
you wait for your soHtary piano to pitch the tune? 
On these steps you can throw your trills up heaven- 
ward. 

An ice- wagon! With a tail-board! Is there no 
lady in her forties, prim in youth, who will take her 
fling? Or does no gentleman in silk hat wish a piece 
of ice to suck? 

Observe that good-natured father with his son! 
They have shopped for toys. He carries a bundle 
beneath his arm. It is doubtless a mechanical bear — 
a creature that roars and walks on the turning of a 
key. After supper these two will squat together on 
the parlor carpet and wind it up for a trial perform- 
ance. But must such an honest pleasure sit for the 
coming of the twilight? Break the string! Insert the 
key ! Let the fearful creature stride boldly among the 
shoppers. 

Here is an iron balustrade along the steps. A dozen 
of you desire, secretly, to slide down its slippery 
length. 

My dear madam, it is plain that the heir is 
naughty. Rightfully you have withdrawn his lolly- 
pop. And now he resists your advance, stiff -legged 
and spimky. Your stern eye already has passed its 



176 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

sentence. You merely wait to get him home. I offer 
you these steps in lieu of nursery or woodshed. You 
have only to tip him up. Surely the flat of your hand 
gains no cunning by delay. 

And you, my dear sir — ^you who twirl a silk mous- 
tache — you with the young lady on your arm! If I 
am not mistaken you will woo your fair companion on 
this summer evening beneath the moon. Must so good 
a deed await the night? Shall a lover's arms hang idle 
all the day? On these steps, my dear sir, a kiss, at 
least, may be given as a prelude. 

Hop-scotch! Where is my old friend of the lace 
cap ? The game is already chalked upon the stones. 

Is there no one in the passing throng who desires to 
dance? Are there no toes that wriggle for release? 
My dear lady, the rhythmic swish of your skirt betrays 
you. A tune for a merry waltz runs through your 
head. Come! we'll find you a partner in the crowd. 
Those silk stockings of yours must not be wasted in a 
mincing gait. 

Have lawyers, walking sourly on their business, any 
sweeter nature to display to us? Our larger mer- 
chants seem covered with restraint and thought of 
profit. That physician with his bag of pellets seems 
not to know that laughter is a panacea. Has Labor 
no desire to play leap-frog on its pick and go shouting 
home to supper? Housewives follow their unfaltering 
noses from groceries to meats. Will neither gingham 
nor brocade romp and cut a caper for us ? 



THE CROWDED CURB 177 

Ladies and gentlemen! Why wait for a night of 
carnival? Does not the blood flow red, also, at the 
noon hour? Must the moon point a silly finger before 
you start your merriment? I offer you these steps. 

Is there no one who will whistle in the crowd? Will 
none of you, even in the spring, go with a skip and leap 
upon your business? 




A Corner for Echoes. 



SOMETIMES in a quiet hour I see in the 
memory of my childhood a frame house across 
a wide lawn from a pleasant street. There are 
no trees about the yard, in itself a defect, yet in its 
circumstance, as the house arises in my view, the 
barrenness denotes no more than a breadth of sunlight 
across those endless days. 

There was, indeed, in contrast and by way of 
shadowy admonishment, a church near by, whose sober 
bell, grieving lest our joy should romp too long, re- 
called us to fearful introspection on Sunday evening, 
and it moved me chiefly to the thought of eternity — 
eternity everlasting. Reward or punishment mattered 
not. It was Time itself that plagued me, Time that 
rolled like a wheel forever until the imagination reeled 



A CORNER FOR ECHOES 179 

and sickened. And on Thursday evening also — 
another bad intrusion on the happy week — again 
the sexton tugged at the rope for prayer and the 
dismal clapper answered from above. It is strange 
that a man in friendly red suspenders, pipe in mouth 
as he pushed his lawn-mower through the week, should 
spread such desolation. But presently, when our 
better neighbors were stiffly gathered in and had com- 
posed their skirts, a brisker hymn arose. Tenor and 
soprano assured one another vigorously from pew to 
pew that they were Christian soldiers marching as to 
war. When they were off at last for the fair Jeru- 
salem, the fret of eternity passed from me. And yet, 
for the most part, we played in sunlight all the week, 
and our thoughts dwelt happily on wide horizons. 

There was another church, far off across the house- 
tops, seen only from an attic window, whose bells in 
contrast were of a pleasant jangle. Exactly where 
this church stood I never knew. Its towers arose 
above a neighbor's barn and acknowledged no base or 
local habitation. Indeed, its glittering and unsub- 
stantial spire offered a hint that it was but an imagi- 
nary creature of the attic, a pageant that mustered 
only to the view of him who looked out through these 
narrow, cobwebbed windows. For here, as in a kind 
of magic, the twilight flourished at the noon and its 
shadows practiced beforehand for the night. Through 
these windows children saw the unfamiliar, distant 
marvels of the world — towers and kingdoms unseen 



180 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

by older eyes that were grown dusty with common 
sights. 

Yet regularly, out of a noonday stillness — except 
for the cries of the butcher boy upon the steps — a 
dozen clappers of the tower struck their sudden din 
across the city. It appeared that at the very moment 
of the noon, having lagged to the utmost second, the 
frantic clappers had bolted up the belfry stairs to call 
the town to dinner. Or perhaps to an older ear their 
discordant and heterodox tongue hinted that Roman 
infallibility had here fallen into argument and that 
various and contrary doctrine was laboring in warm 
dispute. Certainly the clappers were brawling in the 
tower and had come to blows. But a half mile off it 
was an agreeable racket and did not rouse up eternity 
to tease me. 

Across from our house, but at the rear, with only an 
alley entrance, there was a building in which pies were 
baked — a horrid factory in our very midst ! — and inso- 
lent smoke curled off the chimney and flaunted our 
imperfection. Respectable ladies, long resident, wear- 
ing black poke bonnets and camel's-hair shawls, lifted 
their patrician eyebrows with disapproval. Scorn sat 
on their gentle up-turned noses. They held their 
skirts close, in passing, from contamination. These 
pies could not count upon their patronage. They were 
contraband even in a pinch, with unexpected guests 
arrived. It were better to buy of Cobey, the grocer 
on the Circle. And the building did smell heavily of 
its commodity. But despite detraction, as one came 



A CORNER FOR ECHOES 181 

from school, when the wind was north, an agreeable 
whiff of lard and cooking touched the nostrils as a 
happy prologue to one's dinner. Sometimes a cart 
issued to the street, boarded close, full of pies on 
shelves, and rattled cityward. 

The fire station was around the corner and down a 
hill. We marveled at the polished engine, the harness 
that hung ready from the ceiling, the poles down which 
the firemen slid from their rooms above. It was at 
the fire station that we got the baseball score, inning 
by inning, and other news, if it was worthy, from the 
outside world. But perhaps we dozed in a hammock 
or were lost with Ohver Optic in a jungle when the 
fire-bell rang. If spry, we caught a ghmpse of the 
hook-and-ladder from the top of the hill, or the horses 
galloping up the slope. But would none of our neigh- 
bors ever burn? we thought. Must all candles be 
overturned far off? 

Near the school-house was the reservoir, a mound 
and pond covering all the block. Round about the 
top there was a gravel path that commanded the city — 
the belching chimneys on the river, the ships upon the 
lake, and to the south a horizon of wooded hills. The 
world lay across that tumbled ridge and there our 
thoughts went searching for adventure. Perhaps 
these were the foothills of the Himalaya and from the 
top were seen the towers of Babylon. Perhaps there 
was an ocean, with white sails which were blown 
from the Spanish coast. On a summer afternoon 
clouds drifted across the sky, like mountains on a 



18^ HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

journey — emigrants, they seemed, from a loftier 
range, seeking a fresh plain on which to erect their 
fortunes. 

But the chief use of this reservoir, except for its 
wholly subsidiary supply of water, was its grassy 
slope. It was usual in the noon recess — ^when we were 
cramped with learning — ^to slide down on a barrel 
stave and be wrecked and spilled midway. In default 
of stave a geography served as sled, for by noon the 
most sedentary geography itched for action. Of what 
profit — SQ it complained — is a knowledge of the world 
if one is cooped always with stupid primers in a desk? 
Of what account are the boundaries of Hindostan, if 
one is housed all day beneath a lid with slate and 
pencils? But the geography required an exact bal- 
ance, with feet lifted forward into space, and with 
fingers gripped behind. Our present geographies, 
alas, are of smaller surface, and, unless students have 
shrunk and shriveled, their more profitable use upon 
a hill is past. Some children descended without stave 
or book, and their preference was marked upon their 
shining seats. 

It was Hoppy who marred this sport. Hoppy was 
the keeper of the reservoir, a one-legged Irishman 
with a crutch. His superfluous trouser-leg was folded 
and pinned across, and it was a general quarry for 
patches. When his elbow or his knees came through, 
here was a remedy at hand. Here his wife clipped, 
also, for her crazy quilt. And all the little Hoppies — 
for I fancy him to have been a family man — were rein- 



A CORNER FOR ECHOES 183 

forced from this extra cloth. But when Hoppy's bad 
profile appeared at the top of the hill we grabbed our 
staves and scurried off. The cry of warning — "Peg- 
leg's a-comin' " — still haunts my memory. It was 
Hoppy's reward to lead one of us smaller fry roughly 
by the ear. Or he gripped us by the wrist and snapped 
his stinging finger at our nose. Then he pitched us 
through the fence where a wooden slat was gone. 

Hoppy's crutch was none of your elaborate affairs, 
curved and glossy. Instead, it was only a stout, un- 
varnished stick, with a padded cross-piece at the top. 
But the varlet could run, leaping forward upon us 
with long, uneven strides. And I have wondered 
whether Stevenson, by any chance, while he was still 
pondering the plot of "Treasure Island," may not 
have visited our city and, seeing Hoppy on our heels, 
have contrived John Silver out of him. He must have 
built him anew above the waist, shearing him at his 
suspender buttons, scrapping his common upper parts ; 
but the wooden stump and breeches were a precious 
salvage. His crutch, at the least, became John 
Silver's very timber. 

The Circle was down the street. In the center of 
this sunny park there arose an artificial mountain, 
with a waterfall that trickled off the rocks pleasantly 
on hot days. Ruins and blasted towers, battlements 
and cement grottoes, were still the fashion. In those 
days masons built stony belvederes and laid pipes 
which burst forth into mountain pools a good ten feet 
above the sidewalk. The cliff upon our Circle, with 



18i HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

its path winding upward among the fern, its tiny- 
castle on the peak and its tinkle of little water, sprang 
from this romantic period. From the terrace on top 
one could spit over the balustrade on the unsuspecting 
folk who walked below. Later the town had a me- 
chanical ship that sailed around the pond. As often 
as this ship neared the cliffs the mechanical captain on 
the bridge lifted his glasses with a startled jerk and 
gave orders for the changing of the course. 

Tinkey's shop was on the Circle. One side of 
Tinkey's window was a bakery with jelly-cakes and 
angel-food. This, as I recall, was my earliest theology. 
Heaven, certainly, was worth the effort. The other 
window unbent to peppermint sticks and grab-bags to 
catch our dirtier pennies. But this meaner produce 
was a concession to the trade, and the Tinkey fingers, 
from father down to youngest daughter, touched it 
with scorn. Mrs. Tinkey, in particular, who, we 
thought, was above her place, lifted a grab-bag at 
arm's length, and her nostrils quivered as if she held 
a dead mouse by the tail. 

But in the essence Tinkey was a caterer and his 
handiwork was shown in the persons of a frosted bride 
and groom who waited before a sugar altar for the 
word that would make them man and wife. Her nose 
in time was bruised — a careless lifting of the glass by 
the youngest Miss Tinkey — but he, like a faithful 
suitor, stood to his youthful pledge. 

Beyond the shop was a room with blazing red wall 
paper and a fiery carpet. In this hot furnace, out- 



A CORNER FOR ECHOES 185 

rivaling the boasts of Abednego, the neighborhood 
perspired pleasantly on August nights, and ate ice- 
cream. If we arose to the price of a Tinkey layer- 
cake thick with chocolate, the night stood out in splen- 
dor above its fellows. 

Around the corner was Conrad's bookstore. Con- 
rad was a dumpy fellow with unending good humor 
and a fat, soft hand. He sometimes called lady cus- 
tomers, My dear, but it was only in his eagerness to 
press a sale. I do not recall that he was a scholar. 
If you asked to be shown the newest books, he might 
offer you the "Vicar of Wakefield" as a work just off 
the press, and tell you that Goldsmith was a man to 
watch. A young woman assistant read The Duchess 
between customers. In her fancy she eloped daily 
with a duke, but actually she kept company with a 
grocer's clerk. They ate sodas together at Tinkey's. 
How could he know, poor fellow, when their fingers 
met beneath the table, that he was but a substitute in 
her high romance? At the very moment, in her 
thoughts, she was off with the duke beneath the moon. 
Conrad had also an errand boy with a dirty face, who 
spent the day on a packing case at the rear of the shop, 
where he ate an endless succession of apples. An 
orchard went through him in the season. 

Conrad's shop was only moderate in books, but it 
spread itself in fancy goods — crackers for the Fourth 
— ^marbles and tops in their season — and for Saint 
Valentine's Day a range of sentiment that distanced 
his competitors. A lover, though he sighed like fur- 



186 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

nace, found here mottoes for his passion. Also there 
were "comics" — base insulting valentines of suitable 
greeting from man to man. These were three for a 
nickel just as they came off the pile, but two for a 
nickel with selection. 

At Christmas, Conrad displayed china inkstands. 
There was one of these which, although often near a 
sale, still stuck to the shelves year after year. The 
beauty of its device dwelt in a little negro who perched 
at the rear on a rustic fence that held the penholders. 
But suddenly, when choice was wavering in his favor, 
off he would pitch into the inkwell. At this mischance 
Conrad would regularly be astonished, and he would 
sell instead a china camel whose back was hollowed 
out for ink. Then he laved the negro for the twentieth 
time and set him back upon the fence, where he sat like 
an interrupted suicide with his dark eye again upon 
the pool. 

Nor must I forget a line of Catholic saints. There 
was one jolly bit of crockery — Saint Patrick, I believe 
— that had lost an arm. This defect should have been 
considered a further mark of piety — a martyrdom un- 
recorded by the church — a special flagellation — ^but 
although the price in successive years sunk to thirty- 
nine and at last to the wholly ridiculous sum of twenty- 
three cents — less than one third the price of his un- 
broken but really inferior mates ( Saint Aloysius and 
Saint Anthony) — ^yet he lingered on. 

Nowhere was there a larger assortment of odd and 
unmatched letter paper. No box was full and many 



A CORNER FOR ECHOES 187 

were soiled. If pink envelopes were needed, Conrad, 
unabashed, laid out a blue, or with his fat thumb he 
fumbled two boxes into one to complete the count. 
Initialed paper once had been the fashion — G for 
Gladys — and there was still a remnant of several 
letters toward the end of the alphabet. If one of 
these chanced to fit a customer, with what zest Conrad 
blew upon the box and slapped it! But until Xeno- 
phon and Xerxes shall come to buy, these final letters 
must rest unsold upon his shelves. 

Conrad was a dear good fellow (Bless me! he is 
still alive — just as fat and bow-legged, with the same 
soft hand, just as friendly!) and when he retired at 
last from business the street lost half its mirth and 
humor. 

Near Conrad's shop and the Circle was our house. 
By it a horse-car jangled, one way only, cityward, at 
intervals of twelve minutes. In winter there was straw 
on the floor. In front was a fare-box with sliding 
shelves down which the nickels rattled, or, if one's 
memory lagged, the thin driver rapped his whip- 
handle on the glass. He sat on a high stool which was 
padded to eke out nature. 

Once before, as I have read, there was a corner for 
echoes. The buildings were set so that the quiet folk 
who dwelt near by could hear the sound of coming 
steps — steps far off, then nearer until they tramped 
beneath the windows. Then, as they listened, the 
sounds faded. And it seemed to him who chronicled 
the place that he heard the persons of his drama 



188 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

coming — little steps that would grow to manhood, 
steps that faltered already toward their final curtain. 
But there is no plot to thicken around our corner. Or 
rather, there are a hundred plots. And when I listen 
in fancy to the echoes, I hear the general tapping of 
our neighbors — beloved feet that have gone into dark- 
ness for a while. 

I hear the footsteps of an old man. When he trod 
our street he was of gloomy temper. The world was 
awry for him. He was sunk in despair at politics, yet 
I recall that he relished an apple. As often as he 
stopped to see us, he told us that the country had gone 
to the demnition bow-wows, and he snapped at his 
apple as if it had been a Democrat. His little dog 
ran a full block ahead of him on their evening stroll, 
and always trotted into our gateway. He sat on the 
lowest step with his eyes down the street. "Master," 
he seemed to say, "here we all are, waiting for you." 

John Smith cut the grass on the Circle. He was a 
friend of children, and, for his nod and greeting, I 
drove down street my span of tin horses on a wheel. 
Hand in hand we climbed his rocky mountain to see 
where the waterfall spurted from a pipe. Below, the 
neighbors' bonnets, with baskets, went to shop at 
Cobey's. I still hear the click of his lawn-mower of 
a summer afternoon. 

Darky Dan beat our carpets. He was a merry 
fellow and he sang upon the street. Wild melodies 
they were, with head thrown back and crazy laughter. 
He was a harmless, good-natured fellow, but nurse- 



A CORNER FOR ECHOES 189 

maids huddled us close until his song had turned the 
corner. 

I recall a crippled child — maybe of half wit only — 
who dragged a broken foot. To our shame he seemed 
a comic creature and we pelted him with snowballs and 
ran from his piteous anger. 

A match-boy with red hair came by on winter nights 
and was warmed beside the fire. My father questioned 
him — as one merchant to another — about his business, 
and mother kept him in mittens. In payment for 
bread and jam he loosed his muffler and played the 
mouth-organ. In turn we blew upon the vents, but 
as music it was naught. Gone is that melody. The 
house is dark. 

There was an old lady lived near by in almost feudal 
state. Her steps were the broadest on the street, her 
walnut doors were carved in the deepest pattern, her 
fence was the highest. Her furniture, the year 
around, was covered in linen cloths, and the great 
chairs with their claw feet resembled the horses in 
panoply that draw the chariot of the Nubian Queen 
in the circus parade. With this old lady there lived 
an old cook, an old second-maid, an old laundress and 
an old coachman. ,The second-maid thrust a platter 
at you as you sat at table and nudged you in the ribs — 
if you were a child — "Eat it," she said, "it's good!" 
The coachman nodded on his box, the laundress in her 
tubs, but the cook was spry despite her years. In the 
yard there was a fountain — all yards had fountains 
then — and I used to wonder whether this were the 



190 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

font of Ponce de Leon that restored the aged to their 
youth. Here, surely, was the very house to test the 
cure. And when the ancient laundress came by I 
speculated whether, after a sudden splash, she would 
emerge a dazzling princess. 

With this old lady there dwelt a niece, or a 
daughter, or a younger sister — relationship was vague 
— and this niece owned a little black dog. But the 
old lady was dull of sight and in the dark passages of 
her house she waved her arm and kept saying, "Whisk, 
Nigger! Whisk, Nigger!" for she had stepped once 
on the creature's tail. Every year she gave a chil- 
dren's party, and we youngsters looked for magic in 
a mirror and went to Jerusalem around her solemn 
chairs. She had bought toys and trinkets from 
Europe for all of us. 

Then there was an old neighbor, a justice of the 
peace, who, being devoid of much knowledge of the 
law, put his cases to my grandfather. When he had 
been advised, he stroked his beard and said it was an 
opinion to which he had come himself. He went down 
the steps mumbling the judgment to keep it in his 
memory. 

It was my grandfather's custom in the late after- 
noon of summer, when the sun had slanted, to pull a 
chair off the veranda and sit sprinkling the lawn with 
his crutch beside him. Toward supper Mr. Hodge, 
a building contractor and our neighbor, went by. His 
wagon usually rattled with some bit of salvage — per- 
haps an iron bath-tub plucked from a building before 



A CORNER FOR ECHOES 191 

he wrecked it, or a kitchen sink. His yard was piled 
with the fruitage of his profession. Mr. Hodge was 
of sociable turn and he cried whoa to his jogging horse. 

Now ensued a half-hour's gossip. It was the 
comedy of the occasion that the horse, after having 
made several attempts to start and been stopped by 
a jerking of the reins, took to craftiness. He put 
forward a hoof, quite carelessly it seemed. If there 
was no protest, in time he tried a diagonal hoof behind. 
It was then but a shifting of the weight to swing 
forward a step. "Whoa!" yelled Mr. Hodge. "Yes, 
yes," the old horse seemed to answer, "certainly, of 
course, yes, yes! But can't a fellow shift his legs?" 
In this way the sly brute inched toward supper. My 
grandfather enjoyed this comedy, and once, if I am 
not mistaken, I caught him exchanging a wink with 
the horse. Certainly the beast was glancing round to 
find a partner for his jest. A conversation, begun at 
the standpipe, progressed to the telegraph pole, and 
at last came opposite the kitchen. As my grandfather 
did not move his chair, Mr. Hodge lifted his voice 
until the neighborhood knew the price of brick and 
the unworthiness of plumbers. Mr. Hodge was a 
Republican and he spoke in favor of the tariff. To 
clinch an argument he had a usual formula. "It's 
neither here nor there," and he brought his fist against 
the dashboard, "ifs right here," But finally the 
hungry horse prevailed, Mr. Hodge slapped the reins 
in consent and they rattled home to supper. 

Around this corner, also, there are echoes of chil- 



192 HINTS TO PILGRIMS 

dren's feet — racing feet upon the grass — feet that lag 
in the morning on the way to school and run back at 
four o'clock — feet that leap the hitching posts or avoid 
the sidewalk cracks. Girls' feet rustle in the fallen 
leaves, and they think their skirts are silk. And I hear 
dimly the cries of hide-and-seek and pull-away and the 
merriment of blindman's buff. One lad rises in my 
memory who won our marbles. Another excelled us 
all when he threw his top. His father was a grocer 
and we envied him his easy access to the candy counter. 

And particularly I remember a little girl with 
yellow curls and blue eyes. She was the Sleeping 
Beauty in a Christmas play. I had known her before 
in daytime gingham and I had judged her to be as 
other girls — creatures that tag along and spoil the 
fun. But now, as she rested in laces for the picture, 
she dazzled my imagination; for I was the silken 
Prince to awaken her. For a week I wished to run 
to sea, sink a pirate ship, and be worthy of her love. 
But then a sewer was dug along the street and I was 
a miner instead — recusant to love — digging in the 
yellow sand for the center of the earth. 

But chiefly it is the echo of older steps I hear — 
steps whose sound is long since stilled — feet that have 
crossed the horizon and have gone on journey for a 
while. And when I listen I hear echoes that are 
fading into silence. 



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